“People escape into other things; you don’t escape into poetry. You confront yourself when you are reading poems…” ~Mark Strand
I’m overwhelmed. Everyone I talk to is overwhelmed. There are so many crises happening simultaneously that it’s hard to keep paddling the little rowboats of our own lives through the ongoing cataclysms.
Anyone who has studied history surely wondered what it would be like to be alive during the fall of the Roman Empire or what they’d have done during the Nazi reign of terror. We may be finding out.
We live in a society that upholds profit as a de facto god. Bombs are dropped to enrich military contractors, schools are twisted to serve corporate test-makers, and the Supreme Court has given corporations the right to secret political spending–offering them vast influence over elections, laws, and federal policy. The average person is squeezed on all sides as billionaires grow every more wealthy while our (billionaire-owned) media fosters divisions between us.
Infuriating is not a strong enough word. I don’t think there is a term yet coined that sufficiently expresses how we feel let alone helps make sense of our anger. That’s where poetry comes in in all its beautiful, inspiring rage. Here are a few examples, with gratitude to the poets.
AGAINST PEACEFUL PROTEST
I want to run through every street in the country
with my blouse on fire.
Bang pots and plans. Wake up the criminals
and scream like a barn door breaking. I want to break
all the windows and steal all the money
out of the embankment of billionaire arms dealers.
I want to throw my own body, my precious
bones and fingernails in front of every bomber
that threatens a runway. I want to disrupt
a nightly broadcast and ask the viewers
Do you know how many babies have turned
to ghosts since yesterday? I don’t want
to sit quiet, meditating on a good example,
Getting old by being played like some puppeteer’s pet
mouthpiece. I want to run through the suburbs
lighting the night on fire, frantic and unstoppable,
until everyone steps out of their well-mannered houses,
their feet touching frost, touching
sand, sea water, gravel, asphalt, grass, starring
at one another, shaking in their nightgowns, asking,
Oh my god, what do we do now?
What do we do?
~
BULLET POINTS
I will not shoot myself
In the head, and I will not shoot myself
In the back, and I will not hang myself
With a trashbag, and if I do,
I promise you, I will not do it
In a police car while handcuffed
Or in the jail cell of a town
I only know the name of
Because I have to drive through it
To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,
But I promise you, I trust the maggots
Who live beneath the floorboards
Of my house to do what they must
To any carcass more than I trust
An officer of the law of the land
To shut my eyes like a man
Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet
So clean my mother could have used it
To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will
Do it the same way most Americans do,
I promise you: cigarette smoke
Or a piece of meat on which I choke
Or so broke I freeze
In one of these winters we keep
Calling worst. I promise if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me. He took
Me from us and left my body, which is,
No matter what we’ve been taught,
Greater than the settlement
A city can pay a mother to stop crying,
And more beautiful than the new bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain.
~
QUESTIONNAIRE
How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.
For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.
What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy
In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.
State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security;
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.
~
COLLECTIVE NOUNS FOR HUMANS IN THE WILD
A group of grandmothers is a tapestry. A group of toddlers, a jubilance (see also: abewailing). A group of librarians is an enlightenment. A group of visual artists is a bioluminescence. A group of short story writers is a Flannery. A group of musicians is — a band.
A resplendence of poets.
A beacon of scientists.
A raft of social workers.
A group of first responders is a valiance. A group of peaceful protestors is a dream. A group of special education teachers is a transcendence. A group of neonatal ICU nurses is a divinity. A group of hospice workers, a grace.
Humans in the wild, gathered and feeling good, previously an exhilaration, now: a target.
A target of concert-goers.
A target of movie-goers.
A target of dancers.
A group of schoolchildren is a target.
~
THE BLADES
In the new world, as the goddess dictated,
each time a man touched a woman against
her will, each time he exposed himself,
each time he whistled, dropped something
in her drink, photographed her in secret
she sprouted a wing from her spine. Not feathered,
like birds or angels, not cellular, translucent,
veined like dragonflies, but a wing
like a blade, like a sword hammered flat,
thin as paper. One wing per wrong.
At first, the women lamented. All their dresses
needed altering, their blankets shredded,
their own hair sliced off like a whisper
if it grew down their backs. And those
misused by fathers, bosses, drunken strangers
evening after evening were blade-ridden,
their statures curved downward like sorrow
under such weight. But this was not the old world
of red letters or mouthfuls of unspoken names,
not the old world of women folded
around their secrets like envelopes, of stark
rooms where men asked what they’d done
to deserve this. And the goddess whispered
to the women in their dreams, and they awakened,
startled, and knew the truth.
They pinned up their hair, walked out into the morning,
their blades glittering in the sun, sistering
them to each other. They searched for the woman
with the most blades, found her unable to stand,
left for dead, nearly crushed beneath the blades’ weight.
They called her queen. They lifted her with hands
gentle as questions, flung her into the air,
saw her snap straight, beat the wings at last,
and they followed her, a swarm of them, terrible
and thrumming, to put the blades to use.
~
CAUSE OF DEATH: FOX NEWS
Toward the end he sat on the back porch,
sweeping his binoculars back and forth
over the dry scrub-brush and arroyos,
certain he saw Mexicans
moving through the creosote and sage
while the TV commentators in the living room,
turned up loud enough for a deaf person to hear,
kept pouring gasoline on his anxiety and rage.
In the end he preferred to think about illegal aliens,
about welfare moms and healthcare socialists,
than about the uncomfortable sensation of the disease
crawling through his tunnels in the night,
crossing the river between his liver and his spleen.
It was just his luck
to be born in the historical period
that would eventually be known
as the twilight of the white male dinosaur,
feeling weaker and more swollen every day,
with the earth gradually looking more like hell
and a strange smell rising from the kitchen sink.
In the background those big male voices
went on and on, turning the old crank
about hard work and god, waving the flag
and whipping the dread into a froth.
Then one day my father had finished
his surveillance, or it had finished him,
and the cable-TV guy
showed up at the house apologetically
to take back the company equipment:
the complicated black box with the dangling cord,
and the gray rectangular remote control,
like a little coffin.
~
PRAYER
God of tulips,
God of lost children,
God of prisoners and patients,
God of Zaatar.
God of Dar and homeland,
God of viruses and vaccines,
God of the first hour before they all wake up,
God of the last hour before we sleep.
When the sky is on fire. Hold us.
When the house is demolished. Hold us.
When the hospital is hit. Hold us.
When the lynch mob is on the streets. Hold us.
When the boot is on the neck. Hold us.
When the headlines forget. Hold us.
Name us.
~
If you’re still reading, I simply want to say that fury helps us stand up to injustice together. But we also need respair. This archaic word is derived from the Latin respirare (“to breathe again”). It means “fresh hope” or “recovery from despair.” Singing helps. So does hiking, dancing, hugging, sharing, laughing, and of course, poetry on the hopeful side of things.
Laura Grace Weldon 