Forgotten Eve

Hear this modern Eve,

where the apple slices sharp

the wax drowns new wicks

swallowing the knife of words

watch a candle cut to flame,

choaked, a blessing came

with an absence of honey;

uttered without tune

where weary throats broke quavers

on past moons, hope a sliver.

Antonia Sara Zenkevitch

The Bend

…life; potential; vitality,
such strength for the able-bodied,
I choose a bolder path you see,
or perhaps ‘choice’ was eroded
by kinks in my neurology
and the way my cells encoded
in ‘abnormal’ biology; …

You Are Not Alone

You are not alone, a cliché but true,
though it sounds like another platitude
beneath which judgement or indifference lies,

yet, when sincere, this phrase can catalyse

threads spun across oceans, footsteps on the moon …

Laughing the Stars

  Laughing the Stars   You laughed the stars Into the sky And, though clouds cover them In this moment of despair With those unquestioned whys In your bright eyes, I know your heaven’s there In the bright spheres of life, So, while we wait For the atmosphere to clear Let me just state For…

To Sweeten Bitter

Pain tasted bitter,

So, breath’s blades and sugar-canes

Spun honeyed braids of auric air.

Measuring Absence; a collaborative poem, join in.

Measuring Absence How do you measure the weight of absence; the void at the gate, in ambit, to wait to become an interval or sequence, a hitch in the air to anticipate, to calculate the mass of an absence …. (What comes next? Can you fill the absence of following verses?)   I have recently…

To Speak

I have learnt to speak;

I have learnt to speak in silence when my voice was gone,

in mimes, memes and gesticulations with one arm,

I have learnt to speak in rhythms when my limbs were


I have learnt to speak within the forms my body allows me,

I learnt to speak again,




if and when

my voice is gone

as voices one day do,

when they speak of all I’ve done

I hope they’ll say this too;

I learnt to speak.

To All I was Before (poem)

  I often speak of all I was before, Those ghosts carried ever in my casement, Echoing, like the voices of the wars I traversed, yet now I feel displacement, Life in pause, forbidden summits, woods, shores, Shops, parties, pavements, Vanished continents, consonants, confidence, The family, colleagues; friends I see no more; Those ghosts carried…

Wild Forever

Wild Forever   Welcome to my wild forever Born of the forests of my mind, An acorn in every letter Of words that no one can fetter Though my body cannot get there, Bones and sinew left behind, Welcome to my wild forever, Born of the forests of my mind.   Antonia Sara Zenkevitch


This poem is inspired by real stories shared by friends and their friends living through escalating conflict in a ‘Holy Land’. I have written many poems recently and over time looking at different human angles of this ongoing conflict. Break “Break his arms so he cannot leave” Pleads a wife to the father of her…