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| More Than a Feeling by Matt Lubchansky, The Nib, April 22, 2020 |
Our generation passes
with both hands over our eyes,
yet moving a certain bluster
through the world as owners,
out the other side
as whimpering eye blinks,
departing roughly the same time
realization dawns
of how the world has carved us,
tumbled us in the rapids
until our edges are smooth.
The preachers wave their cleavers,
hack us apart like fresh fish at market,
politicians widen the space
between the halves
then stuff them with our own fears.
How long will we acquiesce
to rock hunters who pass truth by
in search of people to fit their stories,
characters who have already
been ear-tagged through fable,
pressed into service,
handed scripts and dark glasses.
And yet we continue on with a dimwit virus,
MAGA hats, sippy cups of bleach,
protesters demanding haircuts,
and quiet poets, who navel gaze and describe sunsets
while Denise Levertov rolls in her grave.
Lyndi Waters is a Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the 2019 Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award, the 2018 Eugene V. Shea National Poetry Contest, and the 2019 Wyoming Writers, Inc. free verse contest. Lyndi’s poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in literary magazines and anthologies such as The Owen Wister Review, Gyroscope Review, New Verse News, Picaroon Poetry, Unbroken Journal, Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers (Sastrugi Press, 2016), and Troubadour (Picaroon Poetry Press, U.K., 2017).