My Neighbour’s Voice
My neighbour is a musician;
I hear his sweet tenor suffuse the morning
and the air fizzes, made new. My phone
shows me that millions are dying.
I press my coffee mug to my forehead
so the muscles can unfurl under the heat. My phone
demands that millions of people are causing millions more
to starve. The rain knocks insistently on the window.
It wants me to notice what it does to the light.
There is symbolism there. I will wring it all out
and millions will die, miles from me, last lullabies
tight in my hand. My neighbour begins a new song.
Each note shakes like it is starving,
falls like ash. The future waits for us, singing,
scattering light from the other side of the rain.
Em Humphries is a teacher and writer, currently teaching and writing in London. She is the recipient of the Valeria Dean Burgess Stevens Prize for writing on women and gender, and her work appears in Impossible Archetype, Doghouse Press, and Eyeflash Poetry.