Politics Fiction

POEM: Sonnet on a failure

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(Image via Azfar Ahmad | Flickr)

This article was a finalist in the 2024 IA Writing Competition Most Enthralling Creative Work category. You can read the excellent work of all our finalists HERE.

                                                            *****

This poem is an *IA Writing Competition (creative work category) entry.

Sonnet on a failure

Some people won’t perceive an act of violence
In putting curfews on historic facts
Or inmates of the Great Australian Silence
Already shut up by official acts
Exiled from the purified white mind
By politicians pundits tabloid grubs
To places more befitting for their kind
The empty badlands bush and unseen scrubs

To celebrate the past is grand we’re told
A public force-fed patriotic stodge
No appetite to hear the wrongs of old
From barbeques to the palatial Lodge

But silence has a language and a name
Not listening’s a past and present shame

Brian Musgrove is a former academic and current writer. His work has been published, mainly, in the UK and the U.S. He writes sonnets on contemporary issues to entertain his wife. They live in Queensland.

* Full IA Writing Competition details HERE.

See more photography from Bill McAuley HERE.

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This poem is an *IA Writing Competition (creative work category) entry.  
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