Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
A World Found Wanting, poems by Lorraine Gibson.
A World Found Wanting
Girls, don’t run or walk alone. Home is also risky in a world found wanting.
Dear men, perhaps silence is a type of culpability in a world found wanting.
Pollyanna died! Observe the butter mountains abundant and rancid as greed.
Five loaves and fishes are profane to the economy in a world found wanting.
Small humans bound in winding sheets; meet death in aid of ego and policy.
Under stripes, power seeds discord with impunity in a world found wanting.
Do you cross the bridge by carriage or languish in the mud of history’s cart?
Who will rise and slacken the bridles of indignity in a world found wanting?
In a race to the bottom, beware the ‘scrolling’ forces stealing your potential.
Chains of language broken, traded for uniformity, in a world found wanting.
What a wonderful bird is the pelican. I’ve seen its beak hold more plastic…
I pick my shadows wisely; caves are ten-a-penny in a world found wanting.
The Twins
Habitus is “society written into the body,
into the biological individual” (Bourdieu, 1990).
We were a class of nine-year-olds
when the twins arrived minus uniforms
or school bags; they wore stripy jumpers
knitted from wool scraps that unravelled
over time like rainbow-coloured rat tails.
The brother and sister smelled of laundry
left too long to dry, in a kitchen
given over to everyday fry-ups.
I guessed they had been bussed-in
from the new high-rise estates, built
to replace Glasgow’s overcrowded slums
and filled by families before the mortar
had been mixed to build their schools.
It’s fair to say (at this point) I was raised a ‘snob’.
The twins were given ‘Free School Dinner’ tickets
by the City Corporation. Unwittingly perhaps
(or perhaps not) this spoke to social class and want;
this positioned the twins within my programmed
hierarchy of ‘us and them’. Full marks to me
for reproducing with such ease,
my family’s bias and practice of assumptions.
One boy gave the twins the nickname, wee rice eyes,
for their eyelashes—a sticky mass of grey-white
lice with the constant itch of deprivation.
They appeared to have year-round colds. One day,
the girl twin sneezed in class; number-elevens
of pea-green snot exploded from her nose.
Her brother tried to shelter her from prying eyes,
wiping the mucus with his sleeve, causing
his sister’s face to dry with a tight, silvery sheen.
But then, the brother told the teacher
this sheen resulted from a rare disorder.
I flushed with the heat of insult.
Come on! Did this boy really think ‘we’
did not know that snot is not some rare condition.
Change is possible. Time, and will,
and unexpected situations can (in part)
re-set the hard-drive of subconscious dispositions.
Sometimes I think of them, the twins.
I recall the brother’s caring, his courage
in the face of certain judgy children.
In the echo of these recollections
a long roll-call of shame still speaks my name.
© Lorraine Gibson
Lorraine Gibson was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and lives in regional Australia. She began writing poetry after retiring from her work as an anthropologist. Her poetry has been shortlisted in The Bournemouth Writing Prize 2024, Calanthe Collective Poetry Prize 2023, and Flying Islands Press Poetry Manuscript Prize 2024. Her work appears/is forthcoming in journals, magazines, and anthologies including: Meniscus, Antipodes, Prole, The Lake, Quadrant, The Galway Review, Live Encounters, Booranga FourW, Hecate, Brushstrokes IV, London Grip, Backstory, Eureka Street, and others. She is the author of, ‘We Don’t Do Dots: Art and Culture in Wilcannia, New South Wales’. Sean Kingston Publishing, UK.