by Barbara Lightner
He shouts through the crowd
like a carny barker. “ Coupons!”
“Get your coupons right here!”
Meanwhile, from the proscenium
of self-importance, another voice
rises and falls to the rhythms
of certitude and the hiccuping
of a small weeping
in assurance
to those who had come there
to save country and
their incalculable right.
Upon his removal,
the barker halloos
over his shoulder,
“Coupons!"
"Discounted religion!
a dime on the dollar and a baker's dozen,
no cost to body or soul.”
And the crowd claps and claps
in a synchronicity
of ill-informed tenacity--
whether for one man
or the other,
none knew;
while the gods above
sigh disconcertedly
at the perturbation
of the great
beck and call below.
Barbara Lightner is a 70-year old shameless agitator, retired. She has been a community organizer, an academic, a dairy farm owner and operator, a journalist, a blogger, a bookstore owner, and a poet. Her poetry has appeared here in The New Verse News, The Table Rock Review, Poesia, Come be a Memoirist, and the anthology of feminist poetry, Letters to the World. Several of her poems are to be set to music by Larry Alan Smith. She is listed in Poets & Writers.
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