Guidelines



Submission Guidelines: Send unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com. No simultaneous submissions. Use "Verse News Submission" as the subject line. Send a brief bio. No payment. Authors retain all rights after 1st-time appearance here. Scroll down the right sidebar for the fine print.

Monday, October 06, 2014

FIVE OLD WHITE MEN

by F.I. Goldhaber


Image source: Donkey Hotey at Flickr


Five old white men in their black robes sit
in Washington eviscerating
the bill of rights: an Uncle Tom and
oreo, a corporate stooge and
his clone, a lech, and racist members
of the forced pregnancy proponents.
Religious pretenders ignorant
of science, adrift in a world of
technology they still can't seem to
comprehend. Wined and dined by special
interests, embracing infectious
scourges of partisan politics
that erode the little prestige left
to the court and American faith
in the law. They surround themselves with
like-minded law clerks, consume only
media reports that reinforce
their opinions, speak exclusively
to audiences predisposed to
be sympathetic to their viewpoints.
From October through July they hand
down decisions gutting laws that once
protected rights of women, voters,
workers, and minorities. For a
monetary gain, they handed the
country to a man who did not have
the votes, sending U.S. spiraling
into recession. They made Orwell's
vision come to life by allowing
the NSA free reign, turning our
government into Big Brother. Time
after time, these millionaires decide
business privilege trump people's
freedoms allowing corporations
to buy elections, deprive us of
health care, deny us the right to sue.
Now police invent more egregious
pretexts to arrest you because those
men give them carte blanche to search
every inch of  your body inside and out.


After more than three decades, poet and storyteller  F.I. Goldhaber continues writing professionally. Her poems, short stories, novelettes, news stories, feature articles, essays, editorial columns, and reviews appear in magazines, ezines, newspapers, calendars, and anthologies. Read more of her political poetry in her forthcoming volume Subversive Verse.