by Steven Croft
 |
| Plastic bottles, aluminium cans, clothes, sometimes spaghetti. When a tractor tows in new rubbish at a dump in northeast Syria, men, women and children rush to find the best pickings. Photo credit: Delil Souleiman/AFP via Aljazeera, January 20, 2021 |
In a land where dreams are invaded
by nightmare year after year,
houses broken,
families fled,
buried,
this is the worst shadow
of living, amidst the slough
of better lives
May you patch together a world
in these heaps and spillways,
everything you can build
from this crumbling
find some reason, like a trash bag
of moldering fruit and meat pies,
for sudden joy
as we pinch our nose
and look away
Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, Canary, The New Verse News, The Dead Mule, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart
Prize and Best of the Net.