Looking for You!

I woke one day to hear them say

That they’d atom bombed Iran,

There was no more threat from them, they said,

There was no more Teheran,

They said all their enrichment plants

Would be dead for a thousand years,

‘It’s a win for the common man,’ they said

In some logic, so perverse!

 

But the Nuclear powers got itchy then

And took out Pakistan,

‘There’ll be no more al-Qaeda,

There’ll be no more Taliban!’

Then North Korea shot their bolt

And dropped a bomb on Seoul,

In revenge for the war of ‘50

It was becoming a free for all!

 

Then Beijing took out Tokyo

For the Daiyou Islands spat,

‘Remember the Rape of old Nanjing?

There’ll be no more of that!’

While Hamas firing rockets made

Israelis cross the line,

The next we heard was a nuclear bomb

Had wiped out Palestine.

 

The Saudi’s wiped out Cairo

To get rid of the Brotherhood,

And Moscow, taking a punt

Destroyed Berlin, for well and good.

New York was gone in a flash of light

And London, just the same,

While Moscow’s simply a glowing night

On a radioactive plain.

 

Sydney went, and Melbourne too,

Though we don’t know how or why,

We thought that we’d have been safe down here

‘Til we looked up at the sky,

New Zealand sank beneath the sea

With just Rotorua left,

Built up to a huge volcano

Spewing lava along its crest.

 

So when my cell phone rang, I thought

‘Is there anybody there?’

I hadn’t seen anyone round for days

Since the world had gone quite spare!

A message popped up on the screen

‘I love you, John, it’s me!’

But I didn’t know who the caller was,

It was signed with the letter - ‘B’.

 

I tried to call the number back

But I only got a hum,

There wasn’t even a ring tone,

Wasn’t a service I could phone,

I put it out of my mind and thought:

‘The thing is to survive,

I need to head for the bush if I’m

Determined to stay alive.’

 

The following day it rang again

And the message there was clear:

‘I need you John, are you going to come

And rescue me, my dear?’

I scratched my head in bemusement

But no thoughts would come to me,

I didn’t know anyone in the world

That signed with the letter ‘B’.

 

I squatted in an empty house

In the village of Gulnare,

Everyone else had gone away

There were empty houses spare,

The village shop supplied my needs

So I thought that I would bide,

To see if a radioactive cloud

Would blanket the countryside.

 

The cell rang every other day

It fairly drove me spare,

There wasn’t a way to answer it

To tell her that I was there,

And I hoped she’d finally let me know

Just where she was phoning from,

But all she’d said, and it rang in my head

Was ‘I love you, love you, John!’

 

Perhaps she was the love of my life

That I’d known, and cast aside,

Always in search of the perfect girl

When I wanted a perfect bride,

She seemed so lonely, phoning me

From the great wide world out there,

How could I tell her that I was stuck

In the village of Gulnare?

 

The final message arrived before

My batteries died, went flat,

I couldn’t recharge, the lines were down

So I thought that that was that!

My heart sank into my boots, she’d said

Where she was, and that so far,

For ‘B’ was stuck in a tiny town

In the depths of Iowa!’

 

David Lewis Paget

Reviews

[Sheila Kline]

A gripping tale of the cards tumbling down, one at a time until the deck was left with one more card to deal, and with that lone card left good came with the draw. You bring together two souls who are abandoned worlds apart, but are able to realize good is still alive midst the tragedies of life! We put aside the horrors, and the hate, and the pain and realize love conquers all!
Another wonderful read my friend!!

[Becky C Strukamp]

OMG!! love it love it. Reading along and feeling the torture of war and expecting this to go another way, then out pours the love of one to another, the pain of not being able to reach them through the salvage beasts of war, yet hoping that somehow someway one could let the other know their whereabouts. A hunger and thirst for love and forgetting the beasts of bombs and destruction, yearning that a love be reached in time. Composed only the way a master of tales can deliver. Once again my friend, you never cease to amaze me!! Love it!!

[David Scott]

We are never far aprt from the fates we share in common...
I liked that this poem was not anouther save the Earth plea, but instead about the commonality of the human condition.
I hope your readers get it. Good write!

[Marie]

The end of the world...and two people who should have connected separated by a continent. Very intense.