Let’s Go Musical at Paper Poetry

Can’t Snuff This Candle Out!

A protest sonnet

Espousing unpopular opinions, attacked and mocked by those who said she’d sinned, no tolerance for her provocations, they’d snuff her out, a candle in the wind.

“Julian Assange has done nothing wrong!” “The US extradition is bogus!” “Send him to Australia where he belongs, and sue the crap out of foes for the fuss!”

“Rogue politics have killed freedom of speech!” “Have Xi and Putin screwed the West’s pea-brain?” “They want us all to practice what they preach!” “The whole world is at war now in Ukraine.”

Communication is a human right. This candle in the wind burns through the night.

© Carolyn Hastings 2022

Apologies to Elton John and William Shakespeare if my ranting protest sonnet has taken the lustre off their renowned contributions to music and literature.

I wrote the sonnet in response to Paper Poetry’s Week 17 prompt: candle in the wind. The idea is to embed ‘candle in the wind’, the song title Sir Elton made famous in his elegy to Marilyn Monroe, in an original piece of poetry. My sonnet is not a scratch on the eloquence of The Rocketman’s lyrics or The Bard’s verses, but you can’t deny it being original!

As Elton John did in his song, I played with the idiomatic meaning of the phrase –

candle in the wind — something that is particularly vulnerable, weak, fragile, or precarious and likely to fail, perish, or be eliminated at any moment.

It is the shameful and outrageous reality of the world we live in today that freedom of speech, and the people who exercise their right to publicly express their opinions, are at ever-increasing risk of being silenced. We must push back against those who dare to encroach on what is rightfully ours to use freely: our voices.

Inviting all voices, musical or otherwise, to join the prompt. How about it — Era Garg | M.T. Pariti | Lee David Tyrrell | Alex Guenther | Sally A Mortemore? 🙏 ✨ You’ll find the details for the prompt here —

Thank you all for reading. 🙏 💕

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