Into my box I’d put …

Into my box I’d put all the darknesses -
The dread of a young child calling for the light
The resentment gnawing the spurned lovers’ souls
The sink hole of depression
The void left by a child’s death
The shadows hiding the stalkers and trolls.

Into my box I’d put all the darknesses -
The endless cycles of starvation and drought
The chasm of economic disparity
The scourge of malaria
The catastrophe of cholera
The deprivation of spiralling poverty.

Into my box I’d put all the darknesses -
The silhouette of the unacknowledged trudging to Europe
The monstrous acts of
mad dictators, and the callousness of couch potatoes
The scab on the surface of humanity
that trade in arms to kill instead of arms to love.

Into my box I’d put all the darknesses -
Then bind it tight in manacles and chains
and crush the only key
So guaranteeing no possibility
of ever opening up this dead man’s chest
I’d toss it far into the cosmic well of universal unacceptability.

17^th September 2016
© Sheila Ash 2016