Poem by Martha Landman

Survivor Guilt

Those birds entice the sky!
Their chitter-chatter tweets
birth the day like mountains birth from the ocean floor.
A hillside village disappears in an Afghan landslide.

Pleasure satiated
possums retire to their trees.
Arising from a flower bed a cat stretches and lazes towards a feed.
It will take years to find a missing plane.

The sun, light-hearted, courageous,
brims above the horizon and unshrouds the day;
a lone hen cackles the number of eggs laid.
Three killed by twin bombs in Mombasa.

Saturday morning
cradles the suburb; someone reads
Louise Bogan, prays for lawnmower-silence.
In Sydney a man dies, crossing the freeway.

A door slams!
In the distance a car or two — sirens . . .
In the backyard the gardener earns $20 an hour.
Four stolen tamarins returned to Blackpool zoo.

Photography © Allison Goldin

Martha Landman writes in North Queensland, Australia. Her most recent work has appeared in Jellyfish Whispers and The New Verse News. the poem was originally accepted by The Blue Hour Magazine.

Allison Goldin is an artist living in Cambridge. Her work is a collection of spontaneous drawings from the imagination. The most common link throughout her art are the semi-recognizable creatures scattered amongst and bringing together the surrounding doodles. She is currently studying Illustration at The School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.