Where does the light get in?

Paint me a picture

So I may see

Sing me a song

So I may listen

Write me a poem

So I may reflect

When the days are dark

Art shines a light

It is our story to tell

A political show

Whichever way we go

Either the status quo

Or the rebel rising

It is my home

Beating with life

Light of my life

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Where does the light get in? explores art as a vital force of illumination — suggesting that poetry, music and image help us perceive, endure and respond to the political and emotional realities that shape the world we call home.

Ideals of inconsistency

I beg of you tell me the truth

I want to know it all

Gently peel it back

Not so fast

Let me catch my breath

Step back

On second thoughts

Lie to me lie to me

Spare me the brutality

Wrap it in a wishful thought

What we really ask

Shades of truth

Filtered light

Hidden shadows

We just want a peaceful night

Confirmation of a good life

To see the light

First though we must know the night

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Ideals of inconsistency explores the human ambivalence towards truth — revealing how we long for honesty yet often ask for it softened, filtered or disguised, even as genuine clarity demands that we face what is difficult before we can recognise the light.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.

Childhood homes

Memories are carried 

The starting line matters

Where you come from

Cannot be severed 

Even when we leave in haste

Even when we are displaced

Even when we never go back

Even when we would prefer to stay

Still childhood places remain

In dreams in reality they shape

Distance does not diminish

Where life began 

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Childhood homes meditates on the enduring imprint of origin — suggesting that the places which first hold us continue to shape identity, memory and longing, even across distance, displacement and departure.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.

Deep in debt

Universal are the laws of balance

Aligning negative with positive

The essence of life

Dig a hole to build a mountain

The sum of both is none

A rule of give and take

In this space the river of knowledge resides

Flowing freely in the passage of time

All ownership is void

Our mass of negative energy is accelerating

A debt so deep it is our grave

Time to weigh with considerable evaluation

The law we cannot buy

Before we are lost in space

Balanced out by nature’s scale

A counterbalance is change

Moving to a new state of mind

To nurture not own

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Deep in debt reflects on imbalance as both ecological and philosophical crisis — suggesting that a culture built on ownership, extraction and unchecked accumulation has drifted dangerously far from the deeper laws of reciprocity, limit and care.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.

Let’s talk tax

A participation payment of sort 

Law and order maintains

To your business door

Those streets paved by tax

But wait there is even more

For the welfare of society depends

On that service fee being met

Now let’s see

If you avoid paying your bill

Who will maintain society's will

The duty of custom breaks

When there is no give and take

A business does not thrive

Where laws hinder tolls to take

Now the picture comes into focus

For those that receive a break

A gift of welfare is bestowed

So the question must be asked

Was the business in need?

Or just perceived by intellectual greed

A notion most jarring to note 

We paid their maintenance cost

The due date betrayed by abstracting ideals

So they could plunder our civil society

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Let’s talk tax explores taxation as a moral foundation of civic life — challenging the hypocrisy of those who benefit from collective structures while evading the obligations that sustain social welfare, public order and shared prosperity.

Lost world

Sitting by the creek

Stop listen slow

Dip the toes

Cold rush of life

Broadening horizons

Imagination flourishing

In this show of nature

Blooms

All there is to know

Transported

To the beginning of time

Lost and found

In the cycle that never ends

Feel it in your bones

Hearing it for the first time

The beating of a heart

Connected

To the signal of life

A magical place

This world is full of shadows

What I take then is the wild

In the hope it may tame

The nature of my kind

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Lost world reflects on the restorative intelligence of the natural world — finding in its rhythms, beauty and ancient continuity a form of connection that both enlarges the self and gently rebukes the shadowed impulses of humankind.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.

Let them fly

Clip the wings

The bird will never soar

The cage remains

Outside the door

Unjust in many ways

No access laid the trap

 That catches possibilities

Slaughtering potential

The money was not paid

So the gift was denied 

This story is rarely told

We never look beneath the line

Where impoverished children reside

Willing to make the sun shine

Able to fly

For these lost children I cry

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Let them fly speaks to the quiet violence of denied opportunity — revealing how poverty and exclusion do not merely limit children’s futures, but extinguish gifts, freedom and human possibility before they are allowed to rise.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.

Winter is near

The winter of humankind draws near

Science has spoken in alarm

The day may be warm, unseasonal

Land whips at our faces

Too spoiled to take root

For all the rot we fed it

The well of life ran dry

As the last drop fell from our swollen lips

Our gods of gold had fallen short

Adorned in accolades we buried them too

Perhaps one day another kind

Will unveil our bones of mystery

On what was once such fertile ground

Should they enquire

How we never grew to regard our limits

To value the welfare of life and land

There remains of course one moment left

One movement to change the trajectory

Write a new chapter

To mark a start not the finale

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Winter is near explores the reckoning that follows ecological arrogance — confronting the costs of excess, denial and worship of wealth while still holding open the possibility that human beings might choose change before collapse becomes final.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.

The savage

I have seen the face of evil

It smiled at the suffering

Stood in judgment of misfortune

As it tormented the weak

Wore a crown of avarice

Dressed in its own vanity

Seemingly too virtuous to reflect

Any sense of neglect

This wretched soul has no sympathy

The loss of reason seems the most dreadful trait

That enlivens no joy and alleviates no grief

This is indeed a miserable soul exiled from humanity

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. The savage explores the moral desolation of cruelty without conscience — portraying evil not as spectacle, but as a hollow, self-exalting force severed from sympathy, reason and any true claim to humanity.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.

A shiver down the spine

At two minutes to midnight

Nuclear war knocks at our door

The alarm has sounded this is not a drill

One false move and we explode

The edge of the cliff is near

Pre-positioned for maximum fear

Flags fly high on the horizon

So peace could never settle here

Divide and conquer announces the crown

A subsidiary of owned and operated

This is the war to end it all

All it took was a joker and a crook

And the earth shook for one last time

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. A shiver down the spine reflects on the manufactured brinkmanship of global power — evoking a world held hostage by fear, division and reckless authority at the very threshold of annihilation.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.

A tale of magic & mischief

Went to withdraw money today

They said your money is out on loan

Your neighbour Joe needed a home

This trade will come back 

With interest for this loan 

This is a fictional tale of course

Except neighbour Joe did get the loan

From where it appeared nobody knows

Or cares to know what they should 

Set on a default of complexity

Or so it should appear

Much like faith it disappears

No real money was loaned

It was a percentage approximately eight

Calculated from your estate

The magic CAR if you care to know

A transfer of numerical deceit

Capital Asset Ratio should be known

Much like FRB, it is a wonder we do not know

Not unlike a monopoly game 

Sometimes the money on loan is make believe

The mischief of masters in disguise

An illusion by the wilful

A trick so wicked

Even the devil will not play 

This part of the tale is real

Before you sign on the dotted line

Take stock, avoid the shock

And the misery this is for most

If you care to count

Collectively the numbers mount

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. A tale of magic & mischief explores the hidden fictions of modern finance — exposing how opacity, manufactured complexity and institutional sleight of hand can turn economic power into a system most people are made to trust, but rarely permitted to truly understand.

Choosing optimism

I have no reason to give for optimism

Other than the hope of survival

But the truth interrupts

Quickens my step and steals my breath

It has long been this way

So long I wish almost to wane

To give in, let it be done

Then I hear a small voice

I am not alone

I must go on

Until the final blow

I must stand tall

As if it makes a difference at all

It must

Or at least let it be known 

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Choosing optimism reflects on hope as an act of conscious defiance — acknowledging despair without surrendering to it, and finding in endurance, witness and solidarity a reason to keep standing.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.

The economy is everybody’s business

Economics is the air we breathe

When all has been commoditised

There is no escaping its pollution

No wilderness untouched

No soul unscathed

Indoctrinated by ideologies

Incoherent in thought

Where is the value in a tool

That trades life to ‘make a killing’

This mechanism spreads disease as excess grows  

Free trade is a myth, the labourer cannot move

Trapped in their plot this is their plight

Rulers seize with might

The workers right to life

A life should have reward

A life should have joy

A life should have security

A life should have leisure

A life should have a chance

A life should have dignity

This is the life profit should buy

There will come a shift

When no more can be borne

Exhausted all faith

The belief will rise from within

If you dare to live a dignified life

Unified by peace, terror subsides 

Take another look, read a book 

It is not as hard as it seems

To set the human spirit free

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. The economy is everybody’s business explores economic life as a moral and political structure that reaches into every corner of existence — rejecting systems that commodify people and insisting instead on dignity, security, leisure and peace as the true measure of value.

The wind in my hair

The thing about nostalgia

It grabs you out of nowhere

Flips you on your head

Blurs your vision, trips your step

Makes you remember a past that never was

Takes you down an old road

Then leaves you there alone

At the time it feels like the summer breeze

You beg to be caught up in it

Flirt your way in

But ‘when all is said and done’

It was only a dream of what was not

Wind in my hair didn’t feel so good back then

I dreamt instead of air conditioning

So what is it that I miss

Is it the past or the present that missed the mark

It can be hard to focus looking backwards

I sweep my hair aside

Engage in the current day

And leave melancholy to the wind

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. The wind in my hair explores the seductive unreliability of nostalgia — recognising how memory can romanticise what once felt unbearable, and gently choosing presence over the distortions of looking back.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.

Seize the day

What if there is no god

No man to save the day

To worship, bow down to

Take you away to a kingdom

It is a sobering thought

Without a god to fall back on

This is all there may be

But then none should suffer in his name

Or wait for heaven’s door

For this day is for the making

Heaven is here on earth

We do not have long

Our energy must pass on

Continuous cycle of life

Flows through our veins

Vanity may say otherwise

But it has never been wise

The glory of life resides in each day

Made by many hands, not a single man

The day that is seized is returned

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Seize the day explores meaning in the absence of divine rescue — affirming earthly life, shared human responsibility and the sacred urgency of making something just, generous and alive with the time we are given.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.

Little bird

In a forest without a tree

Little bird had no reason to sing

All life had been commoditised

Where is left?

For little bird to nest

Crown land or private property

Capitalise and capture

A king’s domain

The rule of law

Divine right

To own all

Trading away the world

Leaving nothing for all

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Little bird reflects on the violence of turning the living world into property — mourning how commodification, ownership and extraction leave less and less room for fragile life to belong, shelter and endure.

The clock is ticking

How many more days will pass

Without remark, counting down

Until the clock has stopped

The moment was lost (or stolen)

For a game that only counted scores on a board

When did it become easier to 

Walk away than stay

Obey than draw a line

Forsake the future for the past

Reminisce now for it will not last

Decisions must be made at haste

Before Earth resembles Mars

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. The clock is ticking explores the urgency of acting before irrevocable loss — confronting the human tendency towards avoidance, short-term thinking and passive obedience at a moment when the future of the earth itself hangs in the balance.

Comfort

Comfort these days is but a pretentious play

A utopian dream, a mythological state of being

For if my comfort bestowed your discomfort

Where was comfort gained?

A gain for a loss still equals nil

Until we see this spectre

Comfort will not be real

Just a matrix of illusion, perhaps even delusion

Balance must precede the comfortable shield

For balance is the equaliser of life

And comfort resides in truth not lies

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Comfort reflects on the false promise of ease built on another’s suffering — suggesting that genuine comfort cannot exist without balance, honesty and a more equal reckoning with how we live alongside one another.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.

Rebellion

There were times I thought this was enough

To sustain and nourish, even flourish

I thought I could dream

Be lifted up by my own hand

Escape the shackles

Re-purpose them instead

A redesign to showcase 

Kindness

A sense of what is fair

With earthly prosperity shared

The life I dreamt of seems further than the moon

A moon walk would be easier make no mistake

Living contained by a wall, ceiling or chain

When will we claim our own lives

Break down the wall and trade freely

Remove the ceiling and reach for the stars

Unlock the chain and free the mind

One question remains

When?

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Rebellion explores the distance between imagined freedom and lived constraint — turning its gaze towards the structures that confine human possibility and asking when fairness, dignity and true collective liberation will finally be claimed.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.

Pain reduction

My dearest friend

I see your pain

Digging deep into that pit

Of despair you cannot escape

Words offer little comfort

To a heart that is raging

These are not just words

They are recognition

We are never far apart

When love is held

So hold on tight

Take your time

You may be battered

But you are not broken

And if you must bury yourself

Bury yourself in this friendship

That comes from me to you

Because I see you

Standing stronger than the storm

Leaving the past behind

-Camille Delaquise

This poem appears in RISE, Camille’s second contemporary poetry collection. Pain reduction reflects on friendship as a form of steadfast witness — suggesting that while pain cannot always be solved by language alone, love, recognition and patient solidarity can help carry a person back towards strength.

This poem is available as a contemporary poetry print on textured recycled card.