Two Poems

by Susie Gharib (July 2020)

Mountain Graveyard, Kurt Schwitters, 1919

 

 

Placation

 

When ancient man placated the gods,

human sacrifice was the ugly cult,

a children’s or a women’s lot.

 

To appease the ire of the sacred fire,

the Vestals with a sexual thirst 

were soon interred beneath the earth.

 

Many slaves were buried alive

within their masters’ funerary shrines

for servitude in the afterlife.

 

Messages on the entrails of beasts

were read as omens by altar priests,

appeasing gods with fragrant feasts.

 

To placate the froth of modern wrath,

strategic regions are bled in cuts

to drain in trickles its petrol-blood.

 

 

Afflictions

 

This modern age is all about infiltration

into compounds, websites, and one’s cerebration,

into creeds,

a sunflower’s seeds,

into some galaxy’s circumnavigation.

 

This modern phase is ridden with arbitration,

a morbid caprice presiding over every nation,

a whimsicality that dictates one’s fate,

a wayward impulse,

swaying balance and determination.

 

These modern creeds are congested with aberration,

an overwhelming obsession with genetic modification,

a sexual deviance entailing mortification,

a single parenthood,

heralding familial limitation.

 

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Susie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with a Ph.D. on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Her writing has appeared in multiple venues including Impspired Magazine and The Ink Pantry.

 

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