TheNewVerse.News : IN MEMORY OF TWO HONEST MEN,ERNESTO CARDENAL AND MY FATHER

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

IN MEMORY OF TWO HONEST MEN,
ERNESTO CARDENAL AND MY FATHER

by Penelope Scambly Schott

I am taking off my hat in prayer for Nicaragua.
I don’t have a black beret like Ernesto Cardenal’s.

I have a dark blue beret like my dead father’s beret.
It is my dead father’s beret. My father was no radical:

he was shocked to learn that a government will lie.
I’m not lying to you now: I don’t have a black beret

and I am no revolutionary. Our president keeps lying
while my trusting father lies in his grave, hatless.

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Recent books are House of the Cardamom Seed and November Quilt. Forthcoming is On Dufur Hill, a sequence of poems about a small (pop. 623) wheat-growing town in central Oregon.

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Tuesday, March 10, 2020

IN MEMORY OF TWO HONEST MEN,ERNESTO CARDENAL AND MY FATHER

IN MEMORY OF TWO HONEST MEN,
ERNESTO CARDENAL AND MY FATHER