Anita Khan is 25 and lives in High Wycombe. She works with young people and the community. Her social and political outlook shapes her work and her writing. Anita writes short stories, poetry and articles tackling social issues for a local newsletter.
Not in My Name
Not in my name,
The bloodshed and devastation.
Driven only by greed,
Commitment to destroy a creed.
Branded as a holy war,
Causing anger and rebellion.
Imposed as disguised liberators,
With thinly veiled agendas.
The blood of our people staining their own soil,
This, the price paid for the gain of oil.
Opportunists alerted.
Identifying preys as adversaries,
Their recruits manipulated.
Religious ideals distorted and perpetuated.
No regards for what is true,
Too engrossed by injustice, drenched in politics
Soon turned to hunger for power.
A heart that’s sour.
Treating the world and people’s lives like a game,
No, not in my name.
Sentenced
Uniformed like clones,
The condemning orange jumpsuits.
My brothers incarcerated,
Tortured daily and interrogated,
Without charge or trial.
Snatched away from their lives,
Stripped of dignity, locked away like animals in a cage,
The injustice: sparks my rage.
The reality, leaving you and I deflated,
Watching on helplessly,
Laws manipulated precariously.
Untold stories bound by four walls,
All to be hidden from the world.
The endless hours of your day, defining your existence,
Trying to pin charges on you, with their sheer persistence.
A modern day political prisoner,
Without objectionable crime or discourse.
Duration: unspecified.
Thinking of you my brothers, today I cried.
Tears Of A Nation.
Reality awaited it’s rightful place in history,
But it wasn’t to be.
Each word etched off it’s smoking page,
The flames attacked with such venom and rage.
Hearts of faith, crushed and stamped upon, trying to erase,
Releasing rivers of blood to flow through the city like a maze.
Washing away the memories,
All that these streets had seen.
Veiled by the thick black smoke, like it had all never been.
A grand existence, became victim to greed.
A stature that rose too tall,
Unwittingly heightening it’s own eventual fall.
The crying soul of the city, no one could hear through the flames,
An empire crumpled, as they dirtied it’s name.
A new way imposed, the weight of it, crumbling the old.
The murderer of liberty ensured that this story, would never be told.
Buildings, the telling symbols of the last,
Too beautiful to destroy in the blast,
Intruded and violated, to disguise the past.
People hearts cleaned like canvasses,
Trying to re-birth the masses.
The defiant, all sent to sea,
In this country, no longer were they allowed to be.
Removed, without a trace,
Like this, was never their place.
