Winter, 2022
I
Apartment blocks stand stiffly like Swiss cheese,
Pale walls sliced through with holes that let them breathe.
Elsewhere a single wall looks wafer thin.
The water is unsafe, it breeds disease.
The crunch of popping shells unnerves the skin.
Faced with this daily diet , people seethe
Remembering those laid in shallow soil
While cooking pots in basements stew and boil.
II
These images are peppered with the sound
Heard by the hungry huddled underground.
And, sadly, we have seen this long before
In Stalingrad, the ghetto in Warsaw.
What does it take to move our numbing feet,
Dogs gnawing bodies lying in the street?
If this is food for thought, then have we lost
The taste for action, counting only cost?
III
The streets are empty, sunlit, cold,
When past the window floats a snow-
Flake, solitary, far from bold,
Lost like an orphan wondering where to go.
Ice melts, but leaves the streets still cold,
Missiles and shells have blackened snow,
The buildings tremble, not so bold,
People like orphans wondering where to go.
N.S. Thompson’s Line Dancing and Other Poems is published by Shoestring Press, £12
