The Apostrophe Blog
After the shock of the November 2016 presidential election in the United States, things got very real very fast. The following year it often felt like the rat-a-tat of explosions perhaps even rapid gunfire—the cruel and verging-on-fascists nonsense that the administration started to spew. It was hard not to have the edginess of politics creep into the writing of poems.
In Fall 2018, “Welcome to the Club,” a syllabics poem that ended up being the first part of my poetry triptych, “After the 45th President Unveiled His ‘America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again’ Budget, the Same Day a Judge in Hawaii Enjoined the Administration’s Second Attempt to Draft an Executive Order for the President’s ‘Muslim Ban’: A Poetry Triptych,” was published in The Poeming Pigeon: In the News anthology.
Welcome to the Club
“…most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being
in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order…”
—James Baldwin
Here, with each normalizing
aside, where spouting bile and
lies so spectacularly
bleed (no matter what hurt) in-
vincible, loud-mouthed, our world
gone afterthought, undone, it
seems my eyes no longer blink,
can’t black away the looking
from an outside rattled, shook.
Yet why am I, are we, all
speechless, ragtag, stunned? This tale
spills nothing new, is known to
all the others cast aside,
cast out of the republic—
it was always them, not us.
The public domain image above, Passenger Pigeon, is by John Henry Hintermeister from 1908.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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- Judging a Poetry Contest… - May 2, 2024
- Publication News: Petals in the Pan Anthology - April 27, 2024
