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Today's News . . . Today's Poem
The New Verse News
presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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Submission Guidelines: Send unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com. No simultaneous submissions. Use "Verse News Submission" as the subject line. Send a brief bio. No payment. Authors retain all rights after 1st-time appearance here. Scroll down the right sidebar for the fine print.
Monday, April 22, 2024
A WOMAN SEES A REDBUD TREE ON EARTH DAY
Sunday, April 21, 2024
FAITH RINGGOLD WITH MY DAUGHTER, AGE 9
by Alice Sims-Gunzenhauser
in memoriam: Faith Ringgold, October 8, 1930 - April 13, 2024
Part I, #4: Sunflowers Quilting Bee at Arles by Faith Ringgold |
audience, you with your pigtail
I with my arm around you.
Her new French Collection, placing
African American figures in
white European bastions of art
within her glorious quilts
disconcerting one or two
of the art historians present.
When it is time for questions
she calls on you first of all
from among the many raised hands.
You ask why she decided
to be an artist.
Faith Ringgold, world famous,
hears the importance of this to you
locks onto your gaze
and says,
Because when I make art,then I'm free.
Saturday, April 20, 2024
DECLAIM
PBS, March 8, 2024 |
Standing at the crossroads, black with traffic
Waiting for the little green man to tell me I could go
When a child, quick as a nightmare, broke from its mother’s hand
Ran beside me, looking back at her, shrieking, into the road.
Without thought I dived, catching at the child
Bringing it to me and to its mother,
Just as you in my place would have done.
Sometimes, my people, your child becomes my child
Your love becomes my love
Your blood is mine.
But now! What are we thinking now, my people?
For years the children have played, been pushed
Into the middle of the road
And we have turned our face away.
But now, when we are forced to see them
When we are forced to see
We turn our face again?
What are we thinking my people?
Let tears wound our cheeks
For what we’ve done.
Let fear wound our minds
That we think so.
Tell me you love them my people, or I am lost.
Show me you love them my people,
Or all we are together is gone.
Mark Svendsen prefers concrete to other more porous materials with which to pave his mind but, even then, cracks eventually appear and poems, like weeds of the mind, take root and must be dealt with summarily. He lives in Zilzie, Australia with his partner. There, she writes music, and he writes things – in an attempt to maintain homeostasis.
Friday, April 19, 2024
RUNAWAY TRAIN
The judge says,
These convictions confirm
repeated acts, or lack of acts,
that could have halted
an oncoming runaway train—
the parents who’d purchased
the weapon,
the unstable son who had killed
with the weapon,
the genocide in Gaza
the US and UK giving
the weapons
repeatedly,
the unstable Israel which kills
with weapons,
repeatedly,
a runaway train
that could have been halted.
Will anyone be convicted?
Lavinia Kumar’s latest book is Spirited American Women: Early Writers, Artists, & Activists—very short prose of near 90 amazing women writers, poets, publishers, painters, artists, abolitionists, early suffragettes, and activists.
Thursday, April 18, 2024
THE BLUE ENVELOPE PROGRAM
State police in Massachusetts have begun implementing a program to improve interactions with people on the autism spectrum, building upon legislation that won Senate approval in January and remains before a House committee. —WBUR, April 10, 2024 |
how to avoid and maintain eye contact
and knowing the inherent dangers of both
how to calmly comply with contradicting orders
how to remain silent while being screamed at
how to contend with the confusion of sarcasm
or being called “boy” when over the age of 12
how to hold hands at 10 and 2 until told otherwise
how and where to store their blue envelope
how and where to store their blue envelope for safe retrieval
how to retrieve their blue envelope safely
how to remain safe while retrieving their blue envelope
how to make no sudden movements while retrieving their blue envelope
how to retrieve their blue envelope while making no sudden movements
how to forget Steven Washington, Stephon Watts,
Dainell Simmons, Troy Canales, Osaze Osagie,
Matthew Rushin, Ryan Gainer, and…
Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is the author of six collections, including the Colored page and The Third Renunciation. He is editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal and an associate poetry editor at Pidgeonholes and Rise Up Review. The 2023 winner of the Solstice Literary Magazine Stephen Dunn Prize, MEH is an educator who received his MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. You can find him at www.MEHPoeting.com writing about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground.
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
WHERE NO ONE COUNTS
Source: The Guardian |
When will we count the dead in Gaza?
Those buried in named graves we know,
all the tens of thousands of them,
those buried in the rubble,
the disappeared
with no one left to name them,
are still unknown
uncounted.
Then the other Disappeared,
prisoners of war
if it were a war,
but with only the rights
of terrorists
who have no rights at all
in this unequal conflict
that some call ‘war’.
And how can we count the injured in Gaza
when there are no hospitals left
and its people don’t count
so no one can count those numbers.
and perhaps no one will
in a country where people don’t count.
Now the starved and starving
have joined them,
the bags of baby bones
the unaccounted numbers
of intentional famine
in Gaza where still
no one counts.
Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes.
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
WAR SONGS AND OTHER LAMENTS
I listened to the ballistic bass / and retorting trumpets / cut with words of war / as if this was a movie / the music an ironic middle finger / to the inevitability / of the end of the world / and it seemed like another sign / in a week of medieval omen
After / the BBC made no mention of their mistake / Johnnie Walker just played the song / so we could all ignore / our electric slide / toward a bigger conflict / since Kool & The Gang / insisted everything would be alright
And if it really was 'ladies night,' that might be true / if women were in charge / drones would be used / to make sure daughters got home safely / and sons would be iron-domed / so they didn't lay down precious lives / because they belonged to one tribe / or another
Instead all we can do is watch the sky unnaturally darken and try to remember how to breathe
Monday, April 15, 2024
TRUMP'S ABORTION CONTORTION
by Felicia Nimue Ackerman
“Trump’s abortion position” by Dave Whamond |
Days after saying that abortion policies should be left to the states, former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday criticized an Arizona court ruling for upholding an 1864 law that banned nearly all abortions...Yet even as he suggested his disapproval...Mr. Trump defended the position he took in a video statement on Monday, when he said that states should weigh in on abortion through legislation. —The New York Times, April 10, 2024, Updated April 13, 2024.
Trump varies his stand on abortion.
If only his prospects were dim.
This country could ward off distortion
By taking a stand against him.
Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has had over 280 poems in places including American Atheist, The American Scholar, Better Than Starbucks, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Down in the Dirt, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Free Inquiry, The Galway Review, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Options (Rhode Island's LGBTQ+ magazine), The Providence Journal, Scientific American, Sparks of Calliope, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Your Daily Poem. She has also had three previous poems in The New Verse News.
Sunday, April 14, 2024
PICKING UP THE SETTLEMENT CHECK FROM MY SON’S WRONGFUL-DEATH CASE DURING THE ECLIPSE
Saturday, April 13, 2024
HEMORRHAGE BOP
I watch three old white men on the news talking
about abortion how it’s no big deal for a woman
to get a bus ticket and travel to another state.
It’s trending on X, these old men in their suits and ties
with their limp cocks tucked away under the table
their small hands gesturing or resting on the table.
I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.
And now Arizona has upheld a draconian Civil War-era
abortion law proving that the past does come back
to haunt. I almost bled out after my daughter’s birth.
I’ve never written about this. It took a helicopter
and two D&C’s to save me. A hundred years ago
I would have died of childbirth. I marched for the right
to choose in my 20’s only to lose it in my 60’s
I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.
In the middle of yesterday the moon eclipsed the sun.
People were brought to tears as they watched
in their special protective glasses. People on both sides
of the aisle equally moved by the night of day.
The darkness I speak of is different. It digests everything
good and fattens the libidos of men.
I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Samuel Allen Washington Prize, she is poetry co-editor of MER.