“Letters in a Shell” and “The Alarm”

A lyric in free verse, I wrote Letters in a Shell in June 2025 as an emotional response to the ongoing and escalating suppression of Palestine activism observed on Western University’s campus, in London, and on social media.

Letters in a Shell

The body is a shell

It speaks, sometimes it moves,

Across imaginary lines.

It arrives and it departs. 

The body is a shell

Sometimes it’s recognized,

Sometimes handled. 

There are times this is unwanted.

At such times this is unjust. 

The body is a shell,

but a hand can write a letter, 

on paper or on glass.

The letters move now,

through the air.

Sometimes they arrive.

Sometimes our words are wanted.

Other words return. 

And so it goes,
across the waves

Until one day they have stopped. 

The body is a shell

but our mouths can sing a song,

while we pray all ears may listen. 

The body is a shell.

It may be gone 

in a flash of light.

Yet our words 

are in the wind.

Through fires and clouds,

a ray of sun,

we can hear each other sing.

***

This poem, a sestina written in 2023, explores the feelings of anxiety and despair I found myself working through in the aftermath of the COVID-19 lockdowns. During the initial pandemic response, we saw people coming together to support each other – only for many to rush “back to normal” as many supports for disabled people, marginalized communities, and those living in poverty were reduced or eliminated.

The Alarm

We’ve forgotten what it’s like, waking to no alarm,
How it feels to mark a month without emergency.
In our sleep we forget to let go of being afraid,
In our dreams we’re still tired from running.
Inside all this connection we’re still somehow alone,
Pushing fingers into ears to hear the rush of our own blood.

The pages of the newspapers are soaked in blood,
Every click of a keyboard sounds a new alarm,
And you’ve forgotten what you loved about being alone.
Now the sound of each new footstep is an emergency
And you wish you could be running, running, running
To some place you won’t need to be afraid

“You have no reason to be afraid,”
So says the woman with lipstick like blood
Who doesn’t worry about leaving the engine running
Who double-locks the doors to check the alarm
First to call the cops in her own emergency
Allergic to the peace of leaving well enough alone

You remember clinging to being alone
Laughing when others asked “aren’t you afraid,”
Believing you’d made it through your greatest emergency
Released now from those bonds of blood
No longer subject to the Sunday alarm
Content with hiding instead of running.

So you didn’t even notice when you were running
Headlong into another way of being alone
Surrounded by the footfalls of a new alarm
Sometimes so like the old one, again you’re afraid,
Again, again, again, dreaming a scene soaked in blood
And the worst part is that no one sees the emergency 

We’ve forgotten how to define the word: “emergency”
We’ve forgotten how it feels when our hearts aren’t running
Faster than they ought to, just to pump the blood
That should never be spilled when we’re all alone
The sight of it is meant to make us afraid
If we see another’s wounds, we should hear the alarm

One day there’s no emergency, we just roll over, turn off the alarm
We fall back to sleep, we’re no longer running, we forget to feel afraid
We ignore the blood, so once more, we’re just waking up alone