Concepts atop Constructs - 24 February 2022

One year ago today Putin's troops invaded Ukraine. Tens of thousands have died and still the fighting continues. I know this poem is a repeat but I feel that it remains appropriate. 

Concepts atop Constructs

       24 February 2022

Putin mirrors Ted Hughes' "Tractor"

frozen in time, in snow and ice.

"Hands like wounds inside armor gloves . . ."

The despot's battery, the need to regain

Russian glory, "hammering and hammering"

until it "jabbers . . . mockingly / Into happy

life.  And stands / shuddering itself full

of heat . . ."  Vladimir triggers his troops

". . . vibrating condemned obedience

Of iron to the cruelty of iron,"

and sends his hubris rumbling into Ukraine.

Marilyn Aschoff Mellor

Persian Feminist

Another poem in my series of people pursuing professions other than what made them famous.

Persian Feminist

             after Carl Tomlinson 

If Scheherazade were a seamstress

she would have enchanted a magic

carpet for a misogynistic monarch

with threads of gossamer, adorning it

with traces of thieves skimming gold,

sailors shipwrecked on foreign shores,

a young lad with his lamp-living genie,

and fabricating tableaus suffused

with swashbucklers clashing against

marauders, completing her task

with feminine subtlety under the aegis

of candlelight in a thousand and one nights.

Marilyn Aschoff Mellor