A Responsibility to Truth.
(For Edward Snowden)
White, black, black, white,
truth, lies, wrong, right.
I tell you my name,
you who are ordinary,
the travellers, the stay-at-homes,
the small and passive, faceless
shoals, caught in a net of lies.
I give you scissors and a filleting knife.
Ask where I am.
Black, white, white, black,
someone won’t be coming back.
I tell you my name,
you who are honourable,
the venerable old, the industrious young,
the not so innocent and hardly guilty,
fools and sacrificial lambs.
I give you a responsibility to truth.
Ask what happened to me.
Lesley Quayle is a poet, novelist and folk/blues singer, currently living and working in the wilds of rural Dorset. Her most recent poetry collection “Sessions” is published by Indigo Dreams.
Well done! Quayle’s poem speaks for millions; that’s quite an accomplishment. And does so with an even hand, developing the image from a radiant center of the understanding that truth is a happening, with witnesses, true and false.