William DrewBatty

William DrewBatty Poems

William DrewBatty Biography

I have written poems since I was a very young child. I have never attempted to publish or promote my work until recently. Poetry is, for me, a way of trying to make sense of things, to succinctly capture the enormity of life. I will never succeed in this task and that truth saddens me. I am humbled to read the poems of others and am in awe of the skills displayed by colleagues. When I feel I have managed to even slightly express my thoughts effectively I am pleased. I have opened the door and bid farewell to the tangle of threads, however slight and inconsequential, and they have moved away from me on a breeze and I have no care to know in which direction it moves. I am glad that it's gone.)

The Best Poem Of William DrewBatty

The Other Side

Her world,
a ball,
bounced on a hard landscape.

Her life,
silently
broken by a coded
satellite sent searing through desert sun and dust.

She plays in her concrete world.

We think she is silent behind her eyes.

She is led gently
by her sister
into the cruel
dryness
where she touches the inside of my television screen.

She drops her ball and with outstretched hands, unsteady,
leans forward to
retrieve her world -
to gain some control.

On the other side
my daughter,
aware, yet also ignorant of the terrible scene,
offers her hand to the static glass.

(5th June 2003)

Inspired after watching my daughter's response to a television news item featuring two small children in Iraq whose parents had just been killed in a bomb attack.

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