Today's News . . . Today's Poem
The New Verse News
presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
Wednesday, March 31, 2021
A WOMAN IN TIGRAY
Tuesday, March 30, 2021
CALEDONIAN FIGHTING FISH
Monday, March 29, 2021
EXPOSED IN MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
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A fist sculpture is situated at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, also known as George Floyd Square, on March 25 in Minneapolis. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post) |
Sunday, March 28, 2021
SWEET APRIL SHOWERS
SERMON FOR SPRING HOLIDAYS
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Source: Image from NewVoices.org via Haggadot.com. Adapted from Dinah Winnick. |
Saturday, March 27, 2021
FLOWERS FOR SARAH EVERARD
Friday, March 26, 2021
FLASH NEWS
Thursday, March 25, 2021
VACCINE REACTIONS
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On April 18, 1955, 8-year-old Ann Hill of Tallahassee, Fla. received one of the first Salk polio vaccine shots. Credit AP via NPR. |
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
PAGE FROM A BOOK OF DAYS
LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF JOE BIDEN
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
THE NEW MATH
Monday, March 22, 2021
SECOND SHOT
Sunday, March 21, 2021
LETTER FROM SOLITARY
Saturday, March 20, 2021
SPRING BREAK
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Spring Break ramps up on Fort Lauderdale beach and bars nearby. (Mike Stocker / South Florida Sun Sentinel) |
Friday, March 19, 2021
ESCAPE PLANS
Wednesday, March 17, 2021
ELIMINATING TEMPTATIONS
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Shootings at Atlanta-area massage parlors have left eight people dead, most of them Asian women. In this photo, former Washington Governor and former US Ambassador to China Gary Locke holds a sign reading "Hate is a Virus" as he speaks during the "We Are Not Silent" rally against anti-Asian hate in response to recent anti-Asian crime in the Chinatown-International District of Seattle, Washington on March 13, 2021. Photo: JASON REDMOND / AFP/GETTY via Newsweek |
DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME
What does it matter?
When lighted days
are shingled with dread
and hullabaloos have shifted
to groans and smirks?
We could capture it in a teacup
time’s familiar wastage, not of the essence.
Our measurements, dots on a dial
foolish in the planetary run.
Who will count the hours
When the sea rises to cover all?
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
SAVAGE AND IGNORANT DELIGHT
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In this photo provided by Adam Messer is a gray wolf, a member of the Nez Perce pack, seen north of Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park, Wyo., on March 31, 2002. Wolf hunting policies in some U.S. states are taking an aggressive turn as Republican lawmakers and conservative hunting groups push to curb their numbers. Antipathy toward wolves for killing livestock and big game dates to when early European immigrants settled the American West in the 1800s. (Adam Messer via AP) |
Monday, March 15, 2021
MISS CISSY TEACHES A MATH LESSON
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George Floyd as a boy with his mother Larcenia, known as Miss Cissy, who died on May 30, 2018 |
Sunday, March 14, 2021
FROM THE CORE OF OUR WORLD
by Angelica Whitehorne
The sad leaked like ripe fruit from the core of our world
The men in blue pepper sprayed a nine year old girl
I don’t think the politicians, protected in suits, will save us
I don’t think these issues are something they’d care to discuss
We woke up to close the blinds against a wildfire world
The men in blue pepper sprayed a nine year old girl
I don’t believe life ends at Black or starts at conception
I don’t believe in law enforcement’s redemption
We live in the same country but different worlds
The men in blue pepper sprayed a nine year old girl
cops / defenders / bastards they’ll come for you too,
hit you hard in the streets if you step on their shoes
I sent a letter to the P.O. box of our homeless world
The men in blue pepper sprayed a nine year old girl
We’ve been taught rights are something we can negotiate
We’ve seen first hand our systems were contrived in hate
We stand outside and wave goodbye to a disappearing world
The men in blue pepper sprayed a nine year old girl
I wonder if there is a point where we’re past being saved
If this marks a civilization too utterly depraved
I want so bad to rescue this reckless, refuge world
I want so bad to cover the eyes of the nine year old girl
Open your own eyes and see where the real danger compiles
in our actions, in our violence, not in the fearful, backtalk of a child.
What if we gather and release this knotted up, wounded world
and teach the next generation to protect all nine year old girls?
Am I too hopeful or can we confront it, our long past of disparity?
Am I too hopeful or can we grow them, our seeds of peaceful solidarity?
Angelica Whitehorne is a New York artist who writes poems, pieces of fiction, and stanza-formatted rants about the world we’re living in. She’s not creative enough to write about some other world, so this one is all she’s got. She has published or forthcoming work in The Laurel Review, The Cardiff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Mantis, Ruminate, and Hooligan Magazine among others.
Saturday, March 13, 2021
COVID LARGESSE
Friday, March 12, 2021
MS. SOPHIE PENDER
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Sophie Pender started The 93% Club when she was at Bristol University for students who felt discriminated against for not being rich and from private schools. Photograph: Graeme Robertson / The Guardian, March 6, 2021. |
Thursday, March 11, 2021
PROCTORING THE ACT DURING A PANDEMIC
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
LAST WEEK
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Photo via Pinterest |
There used to be a rocking chair upstairs.
I’d listen to the news. The news was stark:
wildlife repopulating city squares,
containment efforts always off the mark.
Vending machines have long run out of prayers.
Torn passports waft through the uprooted park.
There used to be a rocking chair upstairs.
Last week even the poltergeists went dark.
Anton Yakovlev’s latest chapbook Chronos Dines Alone (SurVision Books, 2018) won the James Tate Poetry Prize. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of poetry by Sergei Yesenin, was published by Sensitive Skin Books in 2019.
Tuesday, March 09, 2021
BRAVE RED
Monday, March 08, 2021
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY 2021:
A LIST POEM
Sunday, March 07, 2021
CALENDAR GIRLS
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St. Agnes, stained-glass window in the parish church of St. George in Fritzdorf, Germany. |
The head of an independent enquiry investigating church child abuse in France said Tuesday that there might have been up to 10,000 victims since 1950. Jean-Marc Sauve, head of a commission set up by the Catholic church, said that a previous estimate in June last year of 3,000 victims "is certainly an underestimate. It's possible that the figure is at least 10,000," he added at a press conference where he delivered an update on the commission's work. A hotline set up in June 2019 for victims and witnesses to report abuse received 6,500 calls in the first 17 months of operation. "The big question for us is 'how many victims came forward'? Is it 25 percent? 10 percent, 5 percent or less?," Sauve told reporters. —France24, March 2, 2021 |
January: Agnes—her name means “Chaste One”—
holds a lamb (a pun on the Latin agnus).
Note the flowing streams of her hair, which hid her
twelve-year-old body,
naked, on parade to a Roman brothel.
Note the sword employed when her would-be rapists—
like the flames lit later—refused to touch her.
Notice the palm branch,
signifying martyrdom. Note her crimson
robe, another emblem of Christian martyrs.
Patron saint of victims of rape, Saint Agnes,
ora pro nobis.
*
February: Agatha—Greek for “Good Girl”—
bears her severed breasts on a plate, serenely.
Tortured for her chastity. Never raped, though.
Virgin and martyr.
Spared the degradation of rape’s defilement,
though she died a sexual sadist’s plaything.
Lesson: God won’t tolerate rape’s pollution
tainting a Good Girl.
*
Skip ahead. Miss May is Antonia Mesina.
Head and face smashed in in the nineteen-thirties.
Age sixteen when brained by a thwarted rapist.
I was a teen, too,
when the Pope beatified her. Another
virgin-martyr patron of rape survivors.
Verified as virgo intacta—something
ever-so-private;
something that her modesty wanted shielded;
something she had given her life defending;
something that her coroners broadcast widely.
Waved in our faces,
alleluia. See how the Lord protects His
favored ones from genital violation?
Doctors’ probings proved that she’d kept her hymen.
Proved she was holy.
*
Moving on: Maria Goretti, farmgirl.
Miss July. In 1902, a neighbor
stabbed her fourteen times when he failed to rape her.
She was eleven.
How had I offended the Lord at less than
half her age—allowed to be raped, not murdered?
Even in my innocence, I was guilty.
I was unworthy.
God withheld divine intervention, proving
I was not an Agatha, nor an Agnes.
I’d deserved what happened to me, like other
rape-punished children.
*
Pray for us. And pray for a Church whose members
help abusers stigmatize rape’s survivors,
though Augustine’s City of God said virgins
raped are still virgins.
Pray for us. And pray for a Church more heartless
now than when Aquinas affirmed that raped nuns—
even those impregnated—still are virgins:
mind over matter.
Pray for us. And pray that our Church recalls that
Miss December—virgin and martyr Lucy—
claimed a second heavenly crown would honor
those who’d been ravished.
How it would have helped me, to hear that virtue
wasn’t something stored in a telltale membrane
someone else’s lust could destroy, forever
leaving you lesser.
How it would have helped, to have heard this message:
Virtue—male or female—cannot be graded
pass/fail, based on criminals’ choice to harm you.
(Gruesome injustice!)
How it would have helped, to have heard Survival
isn’t proof of sinfulness. Share your burden.
Minus that, the upshot was Hold your tongue, or
all will condemn you.
Rapists want the world to despise their victims.
Shame buys silence. Shout! Let the Church proclaim this:
Rape indeed does happen to blameless people.
Calendar, update.