A Townlandscape

by Gwyneth Johnstone,
daughter of  Augustus John.

Name Your Favourite Holocaust

There are a plenty to choose from.
The Holodomor in The Ukraine in 1931-32.
Between three and eight million died then,
and the papers kept on it remain secret.
It is most clearly remembered by survivors
through the shame they felt for eating their pets.

Then there is the Shoa of European Jewry,
1937-45, and the Meds Yeghern,
the genocide by Turks of the Armenians
in 1915-still a state secret in Turkey today.
Or at a stretch the deaths in the first
concentration camps, in The Boer War
as run by the British in 1901.

More recently there was mass starvation
as crops repeatedly failed in North Korea,
and Year Zero in Cambodia under the Kmer Rouge.

There are many more, large and small,
what with how they go under-reported.
My favourite would have to be the next one,
if only because it is the one we may yet stop.

Went Shopping, Got Shopped

Though technically I was still 'free'
I was confined by what I had bought,
it was the bars on the product that gave me away.

Uneasy Respites From Fame

'Cocaine is God's way of saying
"You have too much money"'
-Elton John, post rehab circa 1987
though he had a long way to go
to discover safer addictions, like shopping.

After cocaine came crack cocaine-
the intense but brief high that matches
the adulation popular singers gain
from their public acclaim,
the balm that calms how the power of fame
feeds into feeling hollow and needy.

With crack the voice declines faster
than the money disappears,
and the acclaim of the press
morphs into a morbid prurience,
from which there is no return.

Bargaining

is the art of inverting language
where the vendor says to the browser
'Make me an offer I can't refuse'
when what they mean is
'Offer me a deal that obliges
you to buy the goods'.

Have A Little Faith

I am sometimes rung up
by agents who try to sell me
some pricey insurance
for some electronic kit
that I have bought new.

It seems to me most unlikely
that the item will go faulty,
and if ever it did
then in these times of abundance
it would be cheaper to replace
than insure or repair.

To still the anxious heart of my cold caller
who wants me to insure the item I quietly say

'I admire your faith in insurance, 

but you are showing very little faith in the product I purchased... '.

Deaf Sceptics

have the ultimate respite
against the opinions of others;
what they never hear
they never have to disbelieve.