The Garden of Verse: "Seasons Impeaching!" ... "First the Knitting, Then the Guillotine"

Three years after misled voters, Russian bots, a nationwide scheme by the Republican Party to suppress voting and disenfranchise Black and other minority voters, and the manipulations of the undemocratic and archaic Electoral College voting system ... combined to put a moral monster in the White House, the US Congress is getting around to trying him on Impeachment charges. 

This should be a cause for rejoicing. We all know, however, that barring a political miracle, the moribund, regressive and entirely anachronistic US Senate will not muster the two-thirds super-majority required by the Constitution to remove the filth from office. 

Nevertheless we should rejoice in the ignominy of "Impeached!" headlines and the recognition that the current moral midget will bear the stamp of Impeachment on his permanent record throughout history.... hoping always, that is, that American political history continues for at least a little bit longer. 

I celebrated the partial victory of Congress's vote to impeach with a couple of poems, which I am going to reprint here in this blog posting because -- given that (at least for the moment) freedom of speech still exists in this country -- I can.  

In the first of these poems, published earlier this month in NewVerse.News, a journal dedicated to literary responses to public issues, I applied my version of a holiday greeting to a title, 
calling this poem "Seasons Impeaching." The poem is a response to watching the Impeachment hearings, or listening to them on the car radio, or even reading about them in the news coverage -- during, of course, the holiday season. 
Here's the poem. 

Seasons Impeaching

On the third day alone

I begin talking aloud to myself

Or, perhaps, I will eat myself to death

I wake at night

with the word necrosis

in my thoughts

What is it, oh what,

country of my soul

who will you eat yourself out of

given such rot?

Will you smell yourself

dying with putrefaction?

how can anyone be left alone

with their thoughts,

such thoughts,

when the rats nibble

at our toes

and bandits make

for our heart?

The second of these poems was published last weekend by a journal that originates in India, called the Bengaluru Review. Bengaluru is a city of 10 million people located in South India, the heart of that nation's technology industry. 
The review kindly published five of my poems online in its January issue, headlining a web page with the first line from a poem on the national spectacle ("The Hearings") that begins this way: "This is why you hold hearings."
Here's the poem:

The Hearings

This is why you hold hearings.
Anyone who hasn’t noticed what he is yet
gets to see it,
and hear about it
every day.
He condemns himself with his own tongue
making nasty
to one he has already
sought to destroy.

First the knitting,
then the guillotine.



Here is a link to the page with all five poems. Please take a look. 
https://bengalurureview.com/2020/01/18/poems-robert-knox/