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Mar 2020
Buy the top guns in the world
now all in one same album.
Trump, Jinping and Putin
their ode to the public
now meticulously is one same lyric.
Get in, stay in, the home is big!

Believe it or not, it's big
Bigger than Times Square,
Palace Square or Tiananmen Square.
But how they are so sure
have they seen my home or yours?
Yes they say and surely not alone
in one voice they sing, love it
or loath it lockdown is sweet
they saw the next big thing.
Dare not follow their coronavirus lyric
it could be the grave the next we step in.

What we see now, what are we to learn?
When the Almighty wants to whisper
there can be no other power broker.
In no time the sky can turn upside down
and lo back to the basic home flies the lark!
Current British poet laurate wrote a poem on the same theme see below. Two poems eyeing on the current lockdown phenomena from a different perspective. His one is more consoling while my poem insists more on taking a note on our dependence on God.

The question is, comes a catastrophe and of course we should try to overcome it by all means. At the same time, we may pass on without diving deep, without downloading the attached massage that it may come with. We can just skim through the email. But how long can we survive before seeing another catastrophe unfold on us? Because we might be ignoring an attached message.

Lockdown by Simon Armitage
And I couldn’t escape the waking dream
of infected fleas
in the warp and weft of soggy cloth
by the tailor’s hearth
in ye olde Eyam.
Then couldn’t un-see
the Boundary Stone,
that ****-eyed dice with its six dark holes,
thimbles brimming with vinegar wine
purging the plagued coins.

Which brought to mind the sorry story
of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,
star-crossed lovers on either side
of the quarantine line
whose wordless courtship spanned the river
till she came no longer.

But slept again,
and dreamt this time
of the exiled yaksha sending word
to his lost wife on a passing cloud,
a cloud that followed an earthly map
of camel trails and cattle tracks,
streams like necklaces,
fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants,
embroidered bedspreads
of meadows and hedges,
bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks,
waterfalls, creeks,
the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes
and the glistening lotus flower after rain,
the air
hypnotically see-through, rare,
the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow
but necessarily so.
Written by
Shofi Ahmed  M/London UK
(M/London UK)   
  684
   Fawn, vb and Shofi Ahmed
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