Empty

A city empty of children in a cold, dystopian shell
(Janice Turner, The Times, 15th April 2023)

After the war, years of hiding,
and bombs destroying homes,

mothers and children return to subsiding
cities of bare bones.

Soldiers came, conscienceless;
now they’re gone,

immune to emptiness, hunger and despair, while
homeless survivors watch the afterbirth

of contrails fade in the sky.

Kim M. Russell, 23rd February 2026

Image by Mads Eneqvist on Unsplash

It’s the last Monday in February and Lisa is keeping bar at the dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille, when we write 44-word poems which must include a word provided by the host. Today the word is ‘hunger’.

Lisa says: “I was hungry to find a word that would whet your appetite.  One that could apply to many scenarios.  One that many other poets have tackled in myriad ways.  It afflicts any living creature.  For non-humans, from fungi to giraffes, hunger is mostly a biological necessity that keeps the being alive.  For humans it can be such an affliction, especially in territories under siege by war (e.g. Ukraine and Palestine,) or in famine (e.g. Sudan, Mali, and Haiti.) But for us humans we have hungers beyond biological that affect us on a continuum from being mildly irritating to a consuming obsession.”

Lisa has shared poems about hunger by Richard Murphy, Adrienne Su and Kahlil Gibran. As Lisa reminds us, “poets know all about hunger in finding just the right word or conveying the best distillation.”

I took an old poem I wrote for NaPoWriMo in 2023 and reduced it to 44 hungry words.

27 thoughts on “Empty”

  1. Empty . . . but for the horror, a dystopian nightmare we’re seeing unfold every day . . . and “the afterbirth / of contrails fade in the sky” is as devastating a metaphor as I’ve ever seen written.

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