Five Poems by Mark Young

 

A line from Sara Paretsky

 

We tinker with some hidden

settings, secretly keep tabs on

each other. Not much can be

done about an inherently

 

dishonest approach to living

when the concepts of integrity

& quality tend to be self-serving

tools. Nothing ever seems to be

 

properly completed or goes away

forever. No one seems to care that

that's the case. Ukraine battles

forest fires within the Chernobyl

 

exclusion zone that send radio-

active ash into the air. She imitates

the rhetoric of her harassers, &, in

return, is herself harassed for it.

 

 

                                               
Flying the flagellation



It is a Saturday, midway through

the monsoon season, & the



apparatchiks of the political estab-

lishment stride purposefully through



the shopping center in a group, obed-

ient to their own safe distancing laws.



For the rest of us, legal or illegal, no

distance is far enough away from them.

 

Quandary

 

Road-repair works or the

noise of swans. Trucks

 

climbing through their

many gears as they leave

 

the city. Slow procession of a

laden coal train beyond the

 

lagoon. Which one to choose

to sing the blues with?

 

 

What else is happening?

 

The coal mine is hiring, the

health & wellbeing expo is

being set up in the foyer of

the local theatre. The intro-

duction of these initiatives

means the hand cane cutting

championship will continue

to remain in limbo. No point

in chaining yourself to the

council rails in protest – seems

that the festival committee has

made its collective mind up

already, & is busy bringing in

a dredge to start removing

mud from the nearby creek &

to cull excessive roosters from

the local domain. The work

was supposed to start at cock

crow. What happens now

the roosters are taken away?

 

                                 
A poem ending with a line from Beowulf



These videos & wide-

mouth pint size mason

jars introduce you to

the thrill of moving

into a new home when

you don't qualify

for a care package.



I actually heard someone say this:

"From his eyes came a light not fair."

 

 

Mark Young’s first published poetry appeared over sixty-two years ago. Much more recent work has appeared, or is to appear, in Offcourse, Scud, Ygdrasil, Mobius, SurVision, RIC Journal, Unlikely Stories, BlazeVOX, & Word For/Word.