Breaking news was written about two and a bit years ago.
I had heard about someone I knew breaking a bone and they couldn’t even explain how it had happened, one of those freak accidents.
So I started playing around with words connecting to fractured or broken and this led to “cast” and the theatre and the phrase “break a leg” etc.
It soon become a work of division and separation and summarises that if someone is “broken” they are “not alone”. We all are a bit cracked in hidden or human ways.
In uploading this post and as I type, I see the image that I used as a backdrop-a dilapidated theatre with a dormant stage at it’s centre and I can’t help thinking about division, destructiveness and dereliction.
This image and the title of today’s piece focuses my mind on Ukraine. A country of great poetic and artistic heritage and tradition that is under bombardment from -and let’s not mince words here-a psychopathic tyrant and his army.
I am reminded of Larysa Petrivna Kosach, the famed 19th century poet who used the pseudonym “Lesya Ukrainka”. The title of the first poem she wrote, aged 8, can be translated as “Hope” . It was written in reaction to the arrest and exile of her Aunt for taking part in politics that was against the Russian Tsarist autocracy.
The human race has come too far to even consider war or a “special military operation” as something that is acceptable in the 21st century. Or to put it more succinctly-a bored, paranoid, old man hell bent on creating hell for peaceful people is not acceptable.
To steal a line to finish from one of Ukrainka’s best works (“Contra seem spero”);
“Sing my songs where evil holds it’s sway”
Algo.
Algo Poetry-Behind the Lines 