Screenplay

Forget the light

Forget the light
Its tenderness or warmth.
Imagine everything
Is artifice and myth
Only to fight
flesh and blood maternal.
Obscene usurper
Of life both great and small
who would be king
Doth render sleepless night
Her flowers violated at the roots
Crushed human liberty‘s leaves
beneath the libertine‘s scorn eternal.

T.P. Wilkinson, Dr. rer. pol. writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is author of Unbecoming American: A War Memoir and also Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..