April 7, 2023

30 Poems in 30 Days

C N Premkumar

Political Paradox

Politics, the cunning craft
Of provoking people
To fight each other
For amassing wealth
And power
By the politicians
Who are corrupt
And power-hungry
Every day, people

Share millions of
Hate messages
Or fake messages
And argue vehemently
Or fight unreasonably
Each other to increase
The wealth and power
Of the politicians
Politics, a funny paradox
With a serious face.






Langston Hughes





Sylvia Plath

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.


William Butler Yeats

Politics

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.


Anonymous




Nazim Hikmet




ChatGPT

USA Gun Poem

Task:
Write a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss about what would happen if the government of the United States sent its military to fight civilians.

Response:

Shooty! Shooty pew pew pew!
Let's all learn what guns can do!
Liberals in the USA
Love to not their heads and say,
"You bought your guns from a store!
You can't fight a civil war!
Fight the army, you will lose!
They have jets and tanks to use!"
That's not where the story ends!
They have homes, and kids, and friends!
Tyrants threaten you with bombs?
Just remember: they have moms!
You can't live inside your jet!
Can we find you? Yes, you bet!
You'd send soldiers and marines
Up against AR-15's?
They're outnumbered ten to one.
That is why I need a gun.
Don't forget, because it's true:
Government is scared of you.

April 7, 2023

Lawrence O'Donnell On The Most Important Thing In Our History

I want to memorize this opening.

April 6, 2023

The Nation Is Watching This Live from the TN Legislature

When the state constitution allows expelling representatives for representing with his constituents for their federal right to address unaddressed grievances. So the remedy of sending him back for his district voters to re-vote for him and send him back, anyway. At which point the legislator says the body will accept him. The whole session should be an eye opener about what state bodies' issues can be and how they engage them.

April 6, 2023

30 Poems in 30 Days -- April is National Poetry Month

excerpts from "Song of Myself" from Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman


1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy…


6
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier…


52
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.




More from Whitman
https://interestingliterature.com/2017/06/10-of-the-best-walt-whitman-poems-everyone-should-read/

April 6, 2023

Melber Presents & Interprets the Transcript of Judge Merchan's Protective Order & Legal Instructions

A "please don't" is a "legal instruction" from a criminal court judge.

When directly questioned, Tacopino did not answer on TV that he and the team followed the judge's instructions to "talk to your client" after the judge instructed their client to "...refrain from making comments or engaging in conduct that has the potential to incite violence, create civil unrest, or jeopardize the safety or well-being of any individuals. Do not engage in words or conduct that jeopardizes the rule of law, particularly as it applies to these proceedings in this courtroom."

It's one thing for Trump's family or friends to not be bound by this judge, it's another thing for Trump to refuse -- through a planned speech -- to not follow the explicit instructions. That Maralago arraignment day speech's "potential to incite or ..." has been proven to be exactly what the judge told Trump not to do.

What will Judge Merchan do now -- allow Trump and his lawyers more freedom to undermine the court and rule of law? If Merchan does nothing, it looks as if "some things are going to happen" between now and Dec 4 to do just that.

April 5, 2023

30 Poems in 30 Days

Lift Every Voice

James Weldon Johnson


Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won

Stony the road we trod
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died
Yet with a steady beat
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast

God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way
Thou who has by Thy might Led us into the light
Keep us forever in the path, we pray

Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee
Shadowed beneath Thy hand
May we forever stand
True to our God
True to our native land

April 5, 2023

DAMN I'M HAPPY! DEMOCRACY'S WORKING! GO WISCONSIN! GO CHICAGO! GO BRAGG!

GO BADASS BIDEN! GO UKRAINE! GO NATO! GO AMERICAN KIDS! GO JACK SMITH!

April 5, 2023

Progressive Brandon Johnson wins Chicago mayor's race

Source: NBC News

Brandon Johnson will be the next mayor of Chicago, NBC News projected Tuesday, marking a stunning turn for a staunch progressive and former teacher whose campaign leaned into messages of racial and economic disparities and who overcame blowback over past comments about decreasing police funding.

Johnson defeated the well-financed, tough-on-crime moderate Paul Vallas, a former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools who promised to immediately bulk up the Chicago police ranks to curb a crisis of gun violence in the city.

The victory caps a meteoric rise for Johnson, 46, the Cook County commissioner, an activist and a member of the Chicago Teachers Union, who in the first round of the mayoral race, held Feb. 28, had been polling in fifth place before finishing second, behind Vallas.

Johnson ran on a platform of taxing the wealthy to boost citywide services and investing in neighborhoods and schools across the city. He walked back past comments about slashing funding to police departments, saying he wanted to bolster the ranks of detectives but also wanted to invest in mental health response services.

Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/brandon-johnson-wins-chicago-mayoral-election-rcna77196

---

Brandon Johnson was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the mighty AFT Local #1 teachers -- my union! Yay for Chicago!!

April 4, 2023

30 poems in 30 days

The Real Question

Paul Laurence Dunbar


Folks is talkin’ ‘bout de money, ‘bout de silvah an’ de gold;
All de time de season ’s changin’ an’ de days is gittin’ cold.
An’ dey ’s wond’rin’ ‘bout de metals, whethah we’ll have one er two.
While de price o’ coal is risin’ an’ dey ’s two months’ rent dat ’s due.
Some folks says dat gold ’s de only money dat is wuff de name,
Den de othahs rise an’ tell ‘em dat dey ought to be ashame,
An’ dat silvah is de only thing to save us f’om de powah
Of de gold–bug ragin’ ‘roun’ an’ seekin’ who he may devowah.
Well, you folks kin keep on shoutin’ wif yo’ gold er silvah cry,
But I tell you people hams is sceerce an’ fowls is roostin’ high.
An’ hit ain’t de so’t o’ money dat is pesterin’ my min’,
But de question I want answehed ’s how to get at any kin’!


More from Dunbar
https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/paul-laurence-dunbar-majors-and-minors-full-text-1895?path=paul-laurence-dunbar-author-page

April 4, 2023

Rachel Maddow On the Nashville Protests, FL's No-Permit Conceal Carry, & The People of NY v Trump

I live in Florida, and am wondering if Democrats are in a dark, dangerous situation.