[brclear]
A Time to (B)e Very Purpose(ful),
or Why I Will Actively Support President Obama’s Re-election
This has been a season
for the well-dressed to sit in plush red seats, and cheer
the deaths of the sentenced and uninsured […]
For the rich to proclaim themselves virtuous by virtue of their riches.
For the powerful to speak the brave new truth that money is speech […]
There was a time to be born – poor, in the 20s, in the South –
without a birth certificate. This year this may mean you may not vote […]
There is a time for laying words out carefully like a Scrabble player
And a time for releasing one’s voice as from a shook bottle […]
I do not think there is time to dilute our meaning with blood […]
Freedom has still allowed a band on 7th Street
to play “the Saints Go Marching In.”
(A fellow in a fedora borrowed my umbrella to dance along.)
There’s time, it seems, to dance on the courthouse steps
in front of the keystone arch, and three stonewall cops […]
But do you sense a Gulf spill of money erupting?
Do you not feel a shiver in your soft true belly
that a swift fleet of boats is coming to attack [..?]
thank you for this poem whose measured tone subtly cries out the outrage, frustration, grief and fear…..imitating the way most of us, the masses, walk blindly, yet knowing, toward our demise. it even gives a sense of the numbed consciousness, like drugged, having long since departed from reality, living in fantasies and nightmares, but not in natural daylight.
sometimes nothing feels more expressive of the truth than agonized art. somehow, truth needs to be said, and this suits the mood and reaches deep to the heart.
thanks again
yes, and with each reading the press of your truth grows more painful. thank you, phyllis.
Well said! Bravo!
Etch-a-Sketch Rmoney + Lyin’ Ryan = of, by, and for the rich white men.
The regressive Republican Party of No is obstructionist, mean-spirited, thuggish, religiously fanatical, scientifically ignorant, corrupt, hypocritical, untrustworthy, xenophobic, racist, sexist, homophobic, evolution and global warming denying, oily, anti-environment, anti-health, anti-consumer, anti-choice, anti-birth control, anti-education, anti-student loans, anti-equal pay, anti-99%, pro-banks, pro-big corporations, pro-voter suppression, union busting, Medicare mashing and Social Security slashing, fiscally irresponsible, misleading, authoritarian, selfish, greedy, out-of-touch, dishonest, lacking compassion, warmongering, and otherwise dangerous.
Don’t make a Mittstake. NEVER vote for Republicans!
I , aggree with you 100%. But even if Obama wins {May the Lord bless us} we still will have the same people, with the same mind, with the same voice. Is there any way we can escape them, enlighten them, save them from the evil they have embraced while they think it is rightous. On facebook they continually exalt their faith, yet their heart is full of fear. Do we write them off hopeing (as Mitt Romney says) they will self deport. How do we heal them before they destroy theirselves in hatred (and maybe us too). I try to subltly get under their radar, to teach them without them knowing they are being taught. But, sometimes I think this is not a stradegy. I am just a coward for not holding up a mirror and showing them their own face. Langdon , from Oklahoma where now everyone wants to line up with Timithy McVeigh.
Soon after my mother died, we finally found the book of poetry she had been hunting for for so many years. These were poems she had written before and during WWII. Your poem reminded me of her writing. Thank you. She would have loved it too.
Whatever you do, make sure you keep your poems somewhere safe, and somewhere you, and those who follow you, can find them.