Thursday, January 22, 2015

IF CONGRESS HAD LEAD BALLS

by Gil Hoy



One word was noticeably missing from President Barack Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday: guns. In a sign that the sun has set on Obama's gun control agenda, the president's prepared remarks contained no mention of the issue. Two years after the shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the absence of guns from Obama's speech marked a departure from previous years, in which the president urged Congress to pass legislation aimed at reducing gun violence in America. Obama made a thinly veiled reference to mass shootings while discussing national tragedies that have brought Americans together. "I’ve mourned with grieving families in Tucson and Newtown; in Boston, West, Texas, and West Virginia," he said. --Sabrina Siddiqui, HuffPost Politics, January 21, 2015



If Congress had lead balls
in its hearts, brains, 
pelves 

If images of dead school 
children grew 
so palpable, intimate
that their fever

opened a passageway 
through the sizzling
sun, to eternity 
and back, 

would the madness 
stop then? Would 
crimson hollow paired
growths on Wayne 

LaPierre’s head 
show themselves, as
he scribbles his want 
list for bought
and sold baby-kissers, 

counting bankroll gore, 
casting cruel pecuniary 
manufacturer’s 
satanic spells 

on the provoked, 
tremulous, spurred on 
by Domitian, 

dominus et dues, 
shielded by 
mutant constitution?


Gil Hoy is a regular contributor to The New Verse News.  He is a Boston trial lawyer and studied poetry at Boston University, majoring in philosophy. Gil started writing his own poetry and fiction in February of last year.  Since then, his poems and fiction have been published in multiple journals, most recently in The Potomac, The Zodiac Review, Harbinger Asylum and Earl of Plaid Literary Journal.