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Thursday, May 13, 2010

RED FLOOD, BLUE FLOOD

by Steve Hellyard Swartz


The dodo posts a video
On You Tube
So America can see
The Cumberland in brown and red flooding Nashville's streets
He shows us stones and sticks, he posts a snarky graphic
The gist of which is that in Nashville the folks (unlike some other southern cities he could name)
Just got to work and didn't cast blame
The folks he shows
Are white and wet
Paddling their kayaks
Over cars parked at Target
The folks in Nashville are white and wet and don't complain
They're hard at work, that's very plain
The dead in New Orleans can take heart from the dodo's demonstration
You die - you die alone
In this great nation


Steve Hellyard Swartz is Poet Laureate of Schenectady, NY. He is a frequent contributor to New Verse News. Swartz is a 2011 Pushcart Prize nominee for Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Patterson Review, The Southern Indiana Review, The Kennesaw Review, and online at Best Poem and switched-on gutenberg. He is the winner of a First Place Award given by the Society of Professional Journalists for Excellence in Broadcasting. In 1990, Never Leave Nevada, a movie he wrote and directed, opened at the US Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

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