Daughter of ’06

Behind the doors of a London hospital a cry echoes through the halls.

Brown eyed, black haired and singing into the space

a star is born.

The morning sun drifts in through heavy glass window’s illuminating this moment in time.

September 2nd 2006.

Déjà Vu is felt, I’ve been here before.

Déjà Vu is heard, top song on the charts as of today.

Bootcut jeans and chandelier earrings rock the streets.

Logo belts clang on the dance floors as sweaty bodies swing from side to side, ‘Love don’t let me go’ blaring through the speakers.

I am a daughter of 06.

And it is no wonder I hold this with pride,

I’m the gift of a space and time that only cool kids occupied.

I grew up on the last of tv’s gems,

old enough to see them through their end.

I grew up at the cinema.

I grew up on the radio.

I’ve seen changes race by rapidly.

The first phone I ever wanted was a blackberry.

I’m not old enough to forget and not young enough to take for granted the time frame in which

I was so gratefully enchanted

by the people around me and the world I’d one day face

with womanly knowledge

or even teenage grace.

18

I turn 18 this year.

The moment that all the books and movies celebrate.

Drink, drive, just not at the same time.

This is the year where it all takes shape, in 2024.

This is the year in which a new me is born.

Someone far wiser but not too wise,

much smarter but still ill-advised.

This is my time.

I look on to the children of 24,

Technological advancements at their fingertips to explore.

An era in which the past present and future can blend at the touch of a button.

I wonder if with beady eyes they’ll gaze unto me and adore my life experience,

however limited it might be.

Their skin blue and green like their code,

 or a marker of the sickness the world holds?

Do you think like me they stare up at planes soaring across the sky with curiosity?

Hoping to one day fly from each corner of the globe within a millisecond 

on something far more superior than my imagined jet-pack.

Do you think to them the zoom through the air is a taste of the world they’ll one day survey.

Or a looming reminder 

that life is futile these days.

These kid’s live on faith and look up to the atmosphere,

Hoping for salvation and instead cowering at the sight of each metal fiend.

The children of 24 don’t care for chandelier earrings or low rise jeans,

they’re occupied with thoughts of death and hunger.

I used to play with action figures living out the war dreams sold to me.

Giggling as I pulled the imaginary trigger attacking villains only I could see.

Death to the others. Death to all who dare oppose me. Death to the enemy.

Now I watch in horror as my peers live out these grotesque violent fantasies.

Decked out in the latest uniforms, bullet-proofed and barricaded,

An invention of ’23.

They would hurt for their countries, They would kill.

Death to the others, death to all who dare oppose me, death to the enemy.

Death to the men, death to the women, death to the elderly.

They chant it silently, you can see it in their eyes

and though they so clearly are indifferent you’d never hear them cry.

Death to the children.

Death to the child whose mother dare oppose me,

the child who has no memory of his father lost to sea.

Lost to the waves of grief haunting his family.

Lost to the waves of war that washed him till he was cast

away.

October 17th 2023

Rubble washes over the last hospital blasting loudly throughout the air for the thousandth time.

A star is killed.

Brown eyed, black haired and crying into the space.

Behind the wails of onlookers a scared, soft cry can be heard.