First Parish Church, a Unitarian-Universalist parish traces its roots back to the Pilgrim colony, invited me to read some poems on political and social question themes last week.
I was happy to oblige. The parish holds its summer morning services in the parish house chapel, a modest airy room with its own chasm, rather than in the famous stone church.
The relaxed and intimate setting proved a perfect room to read in, and the attentive congregation proved to be an ideal audience. Connecting with a room is a wonderful experience for a poet.
My political poems tend to be angry and sometimes complicated. A few are droll and satirical or, I dare say, funny -- at least in part.
Some of the members of summer crowd waited after the service to thank me. I had to ask myself, 'are we all too old for a big group hug?' Anyway, I'm imagining a verbal hug.
For anyone who wishes to sample the poems I read -- some of them written recently in response to the evil events of the last few months; some of them written during the Evil Days of Trumpery, which I continue to believe must remain in the past -- I'm posting these poems below. It was about a 20-minute reading.
Sunflower People
You hide in the subway tunnels
of life’s unending nightmares
You walk, or ride, or hire cabs for thousand-dollar journeys
to a border crossing
that is no longer open
You struggle down roads of vulnerability and fear, carrying
your baggage,
your children,
who belong not only to you,
but to your country,
and to us all
You shelter in rubbled cities,
holes blown in once-solid blocks
of home and hearth,
sacred refuges that once housed human bodies and souls
by the hundreds,
people no more, nor less breakable than any of us,
left abandoned and vulnerable,
now that death has come to a land
where sunflowers bloomed
You, who flee
and carry one another’s burdens
along pitted roads to the hope of a tomorrow
somewhere safer than today,
that haven
we have all promised ourselves.
That earthly haven
in which we may celebrate another spring,
another birthday of the earth
You carry our lives in your journey
as well as your own,
and those of your loved ones, your ancestors,
and the memory of ours as well,
There is room enough, I know, in your souls,
to carry all these
as there is world enough for you
in ours
Come, walk in our shoes as well:
there is world enough for all.
Texas in Hell
The eyes of the others,
les autres*
Hate mongering
Closed doors of the mind in self-panic
Race-pandering Congressional creeps
stalk the Halls of Hades
When? in God’s name?
A universal set of trigger-fingers
in circular execution
A lake of burning fire
Armed to the teeth = utterly unprotected
Gehenna on the dusty plain
Looking into the eyes
of the lost
No consolation in the knowing
Self-slaying America
Compelled to repeat the same self-torture
endlessly: forever
Infinite self-slaughter
An underworld of hate,
unholy perdition
*”The others,” a reference to Sartre’s play about hell,
titled (in English) “No Exit.”
They are burying children
On the first days of June
The world is a beautiful place
That we have turned into a slaughterhouse
I ask the Roses to forgive me
I beg the Irises to stay a while longer
And help us become as they are, keepers of
beauty
Teach us to walk in the natural light of
compassion
And avoid the thorny dells of the heart
from which only blood flows
Peonies soon will arrive, but will they
remain?
Are they not our children too
and so acquainted with the brevity of our
compassion?
The slimness of our restraint, our capacity
not only
for the severing of living beings,
But for wielding the stubborn serpent’s tongue
that sloganeers
over slaughter?
Ah, you wildflowers of the vernal wild
When we clip you by the necks
And proclaim to the skies that these
sacrificial blooms
Stand for the memory children of Uvalde, the
children of Newtown,
of Parkland,
For the cruelly extinguished lives of
bullet-flowering Columbine…
And when the Peony blossoms, and the Rose in
their hundreds and hundreds
Of tiny white blossoms, their eyes on forever,
scent the air,
Shall I hasten to the sacramental taking
of a few dozen here, a few dozen there?
No one will miss them and soon, of course,
they will be gone,
returned to the shadows, as will we all,
even those who enable the taking of children
from the gardens of humanity
You will recognize these disturbances of the
airwaves, sniff their memes,
Inhale the self-satisfied atmosphere of the
servants of the Moloch AR-15
Give us Barabbas! they cry
Of which state, we inquire, is Pilate the
Senator?
Of which charnel house the Governor?
Then, perhaps, my fellow takers of the fruits
of the Earth,
Who live and love by the bounty of Earth
In regions both warm as love and cool as
reason,
You will join me when we declare a final and
concluding bounty
On those who insist upon placing the law’s
protective armor
on the wasters of the gardens of childhood and
love.
B i p o l a r A m e r i c a
My America (Part I)
Looking at you these fallen days (or me in the mirror)
I join the ranks of your disappointed admirers
We are no longer saving the world
we are saving our jobs
Frankly, I am sick of the whole 'greatest country in the world'
chest-thumpery
and if there were somewhere else to go I would go there
but (still true) if you are not part of the solution
you are part of the problem
and I know which part I wish to be
America, my transcendental gender-free inamorata, you are my sole support
I am one of your pensioned ex-lovers, as
glimpsed in the film version of ‘what-we-now-really-are,’
walking the boardwalk somewhere desolate, like Atlantic
City,
the New Jersey Crimea, sucking up air like one of Chekov's washed-up emigres,
after the rodeo, after the gold rush, after the film festival,
after the failed uprising, after the media has packed up and gone home
to spend a quiet evening in the hotel with their phones,
one of your disappointed vampires in need of a bloody fix,
scanning the pre-dawn streets for Ginsberg set-piece atrocities,
the best minefields of America, dodging gunned-up, hyped-up, trumped-up
scaredy-cops shooting black men because we are afraid of black men
(understandably, perhaps, given all we have done to them?)
and are of course still doing with fanny-pats of approval
from race-card
Republican judges
America, ghoulish dreamboat, ancient lover gone in the teeth,
eager for wounds to lick cuz you like the taste,
you grow comfortable with the deaths of others
They are dying in Aleppo
Other countries (nursing their own broken mirrors) ask,
"What are they are thinking in America?"
They are not thinking in America
Thinking is not done in America,
some calculation of course, some texting, some advertising,
some truly boorish emoting
It's always about us, isn't it?
‘If not, then why are you bothering me?’
My America! after the big affair, after the ball is over,
your kick-line of sulky dwarfs cleaning up behind the parade
You were young once
We were all young once
Your bright young men wore wigs and tight pants, showed a leg
Ladies learned to smoke, swear, dance and dip to apocalyp-stick swingtime
America, your century is over
You open your faded arms to tinpot dictators,
make eyes at banana republics, don the latest looks from funhouse mirrors,
worship pigs who despise everything you ever stood for
... all for a botched democracy, a menopausal male
gone grouchy in the knees, stiff in the frontal lobe
You have no use for carping critics
who spend time spooning with their buddy Google,
the single pop culture lightweight who can stand their company
Write me a check and I'll get out of town
My America (2)
My America, however, is a guy with a distinctly 'different' name
that is to say clearly not Anglo-Saxon (a tongue with more than
enough funny
names
of its own), for example banjo player 'Bela Fleck'
combining Hungarian roots with the Appalachian mountain music that now
defines
his instrument,
itself a melding of deep-flowing currents, Celtic, English, African-American
Who travels to Africa to trace the banjo's genealogy
in hide-covered stringed instruments brought here by slaves
In the film* you can see the respect in his eyes as his fingers work to
copy
a finger-picking rhythm pecked at hummingbird speed by a Malian guitar player
and the respect in the eyes of the African players of the akonting
(a three-stringed, long-necked banjo antecedent)
as they see what Fleck can do with the modern version
The country, that is, of Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang, my Quincy neighbors
whose grandfathers visit to play backyard basketball with preschool grandsons,
the lady who shouts with the half-dozen words we share that I have
planted my garden in the wrong place. 'What are these?' she points. 'Nothing to
eat?'
The country of my wife's grandfather Meier who escaped the czar's army
to carry a sewing machine to work in Brooklyn
My close-mouthed father, born here in unlucky times,
who never once in our hearing spoke a word of his Depression childhood,
but survived to give us what he lacked and carried his secrets to the grave
The Nisei soldiers who stormed up mountains in Italy to take Nazi forts
while their parents were interned somewhere in the ambivalently 'Great' Plains,
and those with names like DiMaggio whose mothers were forced to register each
year
as enemy aliens and whose travel-restricted fathers could no longer visit their
sons' restaurants
while they fought in Europe and the Pacific
Of citizen Khizr Khan, whose officer son died protecting those who served under
him
in Afghanistan,
a country much like this one in having too many wars. (My America can be
improved.)
And Zarif Khan, who founded an Afghani community in of all places
Wyoming,
by taking advantage of a collection of opportunities such as the ranch-hands'
pent-up demand
for fresh tamales, the stock market, freedom of travel, the right to
vote,
found perhaps nowhere else but in these United States
Of Darlene Love who went from house cleaner, to backup singer, to
contributing
"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," to the nation's permanent
holiday playlist
The country where an author (Barbara Ehrenreich)
could write a book titled "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in
America"
and not be hounded by Putin's police
Of Cesar Chavez, Joan Baez, Sonia Sotomayor, Roberto Clemente, Rita Moreno
A country of 'climbing-up' ordinary heroes, open minds, thinkers and doers,
money makers and music makers
with names our own Moms and Dads never heard of,
but learned to play nice with for the good of the whole, e pluribus unum
transcending the clans and tribalisms that set other worlds on fire
because we were the others, the strangers, the newcomers once,
the genuine alien nation
*"Throw Down Your Heart," 2008
‘I Have Lost a Country'
"What signifies the beauty of nature when
men are base?" – Henry David Thoreau
He was thinking about the Fugitive Slave Act,
speaking at an anti-slavery rally along with Sojourner Truth
in 1854
after Anthony Burns, who had escaped from bondage,
was arrested in Boston, where he was "working quietly
in a clothing shop" on Beacon Hill.
It's just one more thing. It happens everywhere.
It's a tipping point.
Someone tips off a slave-catcher, they're hunting up North
now
empowered by federal law.
Burns is hauled before a special judge, in a special court,
created by the Fugitive Slave Act to facilitate claims
against persons of color –
"persons"! that Constitutional euphemism – by any
white person.
Boston rallies and 'mobs' of protestors war with police,
seeking to free Burns, who is dragged through the streets
by federal marshals with guns drawn, guarded by an artillery
regiment
and three platoons of marines, while thousands of angry
locals
watch helplessly, cowed by force of arms.
Burns is returned to Virginia, shackled,
and flogged.
At the rally held in Framingham, Mass. on July 4, 1854,
Thoreau confided that he had suffered "a vast and
indefinite loss" –
but, he asked himself, what was it? "At last it
occurred to me
that what I had lost was a country."
And so, reading in yesterday's newspaper, and again today,
that armed thugs, "federal officers" culled from
border police and ICE,
were firing weapons, hurling flash bombs,
and kidnapping protestors from the streets of Portland,
Oregon,
where they had no lawful business to be
and where no assistance from the federal government
had been sought by local authorities –
but simply performing in the absence of all legal warrant
as Trump's chosen "Brown Shirts,"
I find myself thrown once again into days of rage,
unsettled in my mind, as I too often have been
in these dark days:
feeling deprived of something valuable, if imperceptible,
dear to me and to many:
discovering that I too have 'lost my country,'
and that finding it again is no sure thing.
The American Gulag: An Elegy
Weep not for the family of Márcio Goulart do Nascimiento*
who crossed the river for fear of being murdered by the
neighborhood drug lords
in Brazil, where police told him, 'if you complain
you will be killed.'
For now they are safely jailed in Texas, Marcio and his wife
in one place,
his two children somewhere else in the American gulag,
convicted of infringing on the peace and security
of the great Land of Liberty
because, as he himself confessed, "I did not wish us to
be killed."
Weep not for Juan Francisco Fuentes Castro, fleeing the
violent streets of El Salvador,
who sought only, he pled ("may it please the
Court") to bring his children to safety,
for surely they are safe now behind bars.
Some day, perhaps, he will see them again.
Nor weep for poor José de Jesús Días of Mexico,
who fails to understand why the court cannot tell him
where his daughter is.
And so he alone will not accommodate the Court with the
obligatory guilty plea
until someone can tell him where in this land of freedom
they have placed her, safe behind bars.
For it is a simple thing, is it not, to declare one's guilt
for wetting one's feet in the sacred waters of Destiny's
Dividing Line
in order to preserve the lives of one's own family members?
The Madonna would understand. The Savior would understand.
The judge too sympathizes, but his hands are tied by the
bonds of Liberty.
Weep not for José de Jesús Días, for he is patently 'illegal.'
His daughter too is illegal,
but now no doubt safe in a place made of bars and uniforms,
among the tribes of lost children.
Nor let us shed our tears for the sufferings of Elizabeth
González Juárez,
who alone among so many, knows where her daughter is.
She crossed the River of Tears from Guanajuato, Mexico,
to protect from harm a three-year-old child, abused by
her
drug-dealing father,
and sought the healing Balm of Gilead in the home
of her own mother who dwells among the kind and peace-loving
souls
of Fort Worth, Texas.
Alas, the Land of Liberty could spare no refuge for a single
infant more
upon a camel's back of three hundred million souls,
and so delivered the child straight into the hands
of her rightful, family-abusing, drug-dealing father.
It is the American Way.
Weep not, I say, for the 17 defendants dispatched by the
Court in
an hour-plus session, finishing in time for lunch.
All are guilty.
But, in the quiet watches of the night,
lend a thought for a thousand children, and yet a thousand
more
(by unofficial count at best)
young minds and hearts below the age of legal consent
ripped from the arms of their parents in a few weeks' time
on the strength of a Liberty-abusing Demonic Decree.
How many more victims, both old and young,
lie in separate hells
among the thousands denied refuge in the Home of the (no
longer) Free?
Now is the time for your tears.
*Names
and other details taken from The Guardian newspaper: see
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/18/us-immigration-court-parents-separated-children-families
They Came
First they came for the immigrant children
And we looked away
Because the Leader's toady told us, "Those are not
our children"
And we looked at our own children,
and were reassured
Then they came for the people who cover their heads
or pray too much
And again we looked away
Because we were not Iranians, or Iraqis, or Gazans,
or children of the West Bank detained indefinitely without
charges
And, as the man said,
those are not our children
Then they came for the abused, and those who accused their
abusers,
and for the accusers' advocates,
and for those who fought against their abusers,
But we looked away, and jested at the comedie humaine,
because we were not ourselves the victims of abuse
or the advocates for the abused,
and, after all, we were "not his type"
Then they came for the ones who would never
play ball with Der Leader
The ones who would always be trouble
because they were cheated out of their land
or, perchance, had been enslaved
or who had once owned a country that the slave-owners wished
to possess
for themselves
or who, we feared, were willing to work
for too
little money
or who loved the wrong people
And then because no one else remained standing
in our
diminished patria,
neither advocates,
nor scribblers with their pencil over the ear,
nor Enemies of the People with their hand-held devices,
nor workers’ parties,
nor defenders of the beaten, humiliated and disappeared
nor anyone able to kick the ball from their feet,
nothing was left for us to do
but to lay our own bodies before his feet
as the painted, spiked, and horny-headed demons of
extinction
cheered, and drank, and laughed, and danced upon the bodies
of their victims
and ran up history's score
Slaughter of the Innocents
They are burying children
On the first days of June
The world is a beautiful place
That we have turned into a slaughterhouse
I ask the Roses to forgive me
I beg the Irises to stay a while longer
And help us become as they are, keepers of beauty
Teach us to walk in the natural light of compassion
And avoid the thorny dells of the heart
from which only blood flows
Peonies soon will arrive, but will they remain?
Are they not our children too
and so acquainted with the brevity of our compassion?
The slimness of our restraint, our capacity not only
for the severing of living beings,
but for wielding the stubborn serpent’s tongue that
sloganeers
over slaughter?
Ah, you flowers of the vernal wild
When we clip you by the necks
And proclaim to the skies that these sacrificial blooms
Stand for the memory children of Uvalde, the children of
Newtown,
of Parkland,
For the cruelly extinguished lives of bullet-flowering Columbine…
And when the Peony blossoms, and the Rose in their hundreds
and hundreds
Of tiny white blossoms, their eyes on forever, scent the
air,
Shall I hasten to the sacramental taking
of a few dozen here, a few dozen there?
No one will miss them and soon, of course, they will be
gone,
returned to the shadows, as will we all,
even those who enable the taking of children from the
gardens of humanity
You will recognize these disturbances of the airwaves, sniff
their memes,
Inhale the self-satisfied atmosphere of the servants of the
Moloch AR-15
Give us Barabbas! they cry
Of which state, we inquire, is Pilate the Senator?
Of which charnel house the Governor?
Then, perhaps, my fellow takers of the fruits of the Earth,
Who live and love by the bounty of Earth
In regions both warm as love and cool as reason,
You will join me when we declare a final and concluding
bounty
On those who insist upon placing the law’s protective armor
on the wasters of the gardens of childhood and love.
Proscription List
Oh, it would be so
long.
Let’s start at the
top.
What kind of
country, in this day and age,
permits itself to
be ruled by the sclerotic opinions
of nasty old men
and a conniving Cruella?
I’m not talking
about the Taliban
or the hall of
shame panel of contemporary monsters
in charge of
realms in Syria, Turkey, India, Brazil, you name it.
(Why does the shit
rise to the top in both the autocratic
and so-called
‘democratic’ traditions of governance?)
That witty
Victorian duo wrote a charmingly apt ditty:
‘I have a little
list’ – paired by a perfect rhyming mate:
‘They never will
be missed’
Oh, what a list we
have to choose from in these demented days?
The bouncy
billionaire, the one with all the hair.
And in the event
of one’s fondest wish fulfillment,
the demise of the
lately implicated ex-President:
Let’s add him to
the list
Remove him like a
cyst
(You’ll probably
find him pissed)
On this name we
must insist
Add Mc-CoalMan to
the list,
He never will be
missed
(And perhaps a
fibbing phony now ex-prime
who’s outlived by
centuries his time?)
For in the present
climate,
when we’re
shadowed by a primate,
whose deadbeat
board of phonies
extinguish all the
good,
the deeds we say
we should do –
If only that we
could!
But mostly it’s
that killing bench,
who themselves
deserve a little wrench,
destroyers of
what’s fair and good –
They invite a
little twist
Add them to the
list!
Oh, weep, beloved
republic! What profoundly rotten luck!
To be force-fed a
collation of rancid lame duck!
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