Silesian Landscape

The January wind
bangs
against the window-panes,

maliciously twists
the black bones
of shivering trees,

racks
Baroque clouds
in a scudding cycle
of dreams,

under which rooks,
like cast-out
angels,

frolic,
cough up hermetic
blasphemies

[...] Read more

poem by Leo Yankevich
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For Enoch Powell

The hooded hip-hop scum
heap up the funeral pyre;
the streets of London burn,
and yet, despite the fire,

the bobbies watch and turn
their visored faces away,
as if deaf, blind and dumb,
and England not lost its way.

Two thousand twelve has shown
that you are right again.
Forced to beg and undress,
still-lifed on a smart phone,

men bow and women bend
in multi-cultural fright.
Gone is the wilderness,
gone your voice in the night.

poem by Leo Yankevich
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Sarajevo Sonnet

Within the four walls of this sonnet’s form
(while outside spring rain gathers in a pail) ,
there is at least one happy story to tell,
something lovely brought on by a storm.

Fresh thrifts have sprouted, and a fat worm
lazily crawls out of someone’s cracked bell,
crawls out of the centre of someone’s hell,
out of a skull atop a uniform,

while not too far away, in someone’s rib cage,
in a sunlit temple without a steeple,
two tiny beetles in the place of people,

(their love too pure to ever turn into rage,
too tried and true to ever fail or falter) , —
take their vows before a priestless altar.

poem by Leo Yankevich
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