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.