Week two of The Guardian Photo Poems is now live! Click on the tab at the top of the page (or simply click on the hyperlinked text) to read this week’s highlights from last year’s The Guardian photo inspired poems including straw men, booze in Pakistan, and international relations between China and America.
Photograph: Richard Atrero de Guzman/NurPhoto/Getty Images
A Logical Fallacy: A Reflection on the Kasedori Festival
Straw coat men dancing;
We soak the bird-men haystacks
In freezing water.
Is this what it means,
All fallacies aside, to
Attack the straw man?
Photograph: Xinhua/Shutterstock
Crushed Spirits
the ground is fuddled
twenty thousand bottles of booze
wasted
glass shards shattered
in Pakistan’s soaked sands
systematically the steamroller
drinks deep of foreign liquor
leaving a well oiled wake
while smugglers traffick other spirits
whose loss the earth can’t absorb
Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/AP
The Diplomatic Waltz
This is the mother of modern day dances, the
soft flowing movements and meaningful glances, the
business attire, cross cultural banners, a
step, slide, and step with impeccable manners. The
partners shake hands and begin with the music, a
tenuous exchange that’s most diplomatic; each
taking the lead in the negotiations of
waltzing in elegant de-escalation. They
rise and they fall as they go through the paces and
each body sways till they’re back in their places. How
effortless all of these actions appearing:
the simple, bold movements of agents unfearing.
the deepening ground 