Ban This Book!

Brought to Book

In my teens my mother found
my stack of girlie magazines
and threw them in the bin,
but to stem the flood of hormones
romping through my adolescent veins
was a battle she could never hope to win.

In 1933 Adolf Hitler lit the skies
of Germany by setting fire to books,
an attempt to eradicate by burning
three thousand years of learning.
But the sparks came down to rest on
Hamburg, Cologne and Dresden.

In the Kremlin Putin has decreed a law
that Russians mustn’t speak of war,
fifteen years incarceration for those
who don’t say ‘special operation’.
His Thought Police are on their way
controlling what the people say.

In the Moscow underground
a woman dressed in blue and yellow
didn’t make a sound,
but spoke louder than
any megaphone that
Putin may have found.