Veiled Defences

Poetry by Michael Burch

VEILED

She has belief
without comprehension
and in her crutchwork shack
she is
much like us ...

tamping the bread
into edible forms,
regarding her children
at play
with something akin to relief ...				

ignoring the towers ablaze
in the distance
because they are not revelations
but things of glass,
easily shattered ...

and if you were to ask her,
she might say—
sometimes God visits his wrath
upon an impious nation
for its leaders’ sins,

and we might agree:
seeing her mutilations.

(Published by Modern War Poems)


DEFENCES

Beyond the silhouettes of trees
stark, naked and defenceless
there stand long rows of sentinels:
these pert white picket fences.

Now whom they guard and how they guard,
the good Lord only knows;
but savages would have to laugh
observing the tidy rows.

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into fourteen languages, incorporated into three plays and two operas, and set to music by seventeen composers.

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