Lighthouses – 16th July 2022

~ shaun tenzenmen

Who’s gonna care for you?
Who will show the way?
Who will find the light
When the sun descends each day?
A child to be exploited
Manipulated and prostituted
Bad choices made with mirrors
Doors shut, firmly booted

Who’s gonna guide you?
Point to the right direction
A childhood to be wasted
Staring at its reflection
Dark fingers will be clawing
Promises made with gold
Sorrow is your struggle
Before you get too old

19th Mar 2026 – Shared with W3 #203 – lighthouse. More abstract than the prompt requests but as I’ve run out of time to write much this week, I submit anyway.

And then I find a book that I really love, and I talk about it for a while so I won’t seem like I hate everything. In other words, I hate everything!

Matthilda Bertstein Sycamore
Fatman report

16 thoughts on “Lighthouses – 16th July 2022”

    1. I’m not certain of the inspiration for writing this one but it feels like I was projecting worst case scenarios on some of my students, who were at that delicate stage of testing boundaries and making choices that would potentially affect their futures.

      Thanks for reading and commenting Yvette 🙏

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  2. Shaun, thanks for sharing your poem, and for the note. I appreciate you flagging how it sits in relation to the prompt and I can see why you chose it.

    There’s a clear thread around guidance, vulnerability, and the need for direction, and that comes through strongly. The sense of something at risk, and needing to be steered away from harm, is well expressed.

    It also aligns with what you said on my blog, about approaching prompts more obliquely. Oblique approaches can open up interesting directions, and your choice of poems feels like one of those. You’re working around the idea of guidance rather than directly inhabiting the lighthouse, so it works as a valid, oblique interpretation.

    If you were to revisit this with the lighthouse specifically in mind, it might be interesting to shift the perspective into that role. What would you change if your speaker became the one giving the signal rather than observing the situation? How would you use the change of perspective to shape the voice and the sense of responsibility?

    Thanks again for contributing, especially given your time pressures this week. I understand completely as I have similar constraints.

    Dennis

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  5. You speak truths here. We need our children to be children with pleasant childhoods. Who will take care of them, indeed. I like this poem. Makes me want to pray more for every child to have a beacon in their lives. Thanks for posting this. Lovely

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