Tuesday Poem: No News by Kathleen Jones

On this day
the sun shone on Eden
and the river gave back the light.

On this day
there were eight ducklings
instead of twelve; a feathered flotilla
under the willows where the hooked jaws
of the pike dapple in deep water.

On this day
a politician confessed
to falsifying his accounts and another
to being unfaithful to the electorate.
I have sinned, he said, it will never happen again.

On this day
a trillion dollars
found its way into a secret account
on a distant island where there are no politics
that are not to do with money.

On this day
six fighter jets, twenty tanks and
a hundred assault rifles were delivered
across an unmarked border.

On this day
two football teams escaped relegation
and a banker was cleared of corruption.
The real ale in the pub had the regulation amount of froth.

On this day
four hundred men, women and children drowned
in the Mediterranean, fleeing conflict.

On this day
the magnolia opened its white petals
for the first time and there is a wren nesting
above the door in the hole I drilled
for a lamp bracket.  I called my mother.
She was not at home.

Copyright Kathleen Jones, 2016


Every now and then I try to make sense of things - this contradictory, tragic, beautiful, upside-down world we live in.  I wrote this poem on one of those days - just an ordinary day.  Out shopping I overheard someone say there was 'no news today', meaning presumably that there was nothing new on the news that hadn't been on before.  It made me angry and set me thinking.  It's times like this I miss my mother - she and I would talk for hours on the phone about life and politics and how we felt and how could we deal with the kind of emotions aroused by the terrible scenes beamed into our living rooms by the media.  I still know her telephone number by heart and occasionally I give in to the temptation to ring it, though I know there is no-one there.  Anyone else do crazy things like this?