HOPE FOR THE NEW YEAR

by Barbara Schweitzer

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

There is no rodeo feat to lift history.

History is the slain bull bloodied for sport 

with his blood scoured into the concrete.

 

It is obscene to pick up a pen

on the day disaster flies in

but if not, the next day and the next 

days will keep us dumb to our ways.

 

We have physics and light: we know 

dark cannot exist when filled with light,

that speaking corrals our common plights

and even pigeons know how to take flight

and we are not night. We will not be night.

Barbara Schweitzer writes poems and plays and sundry fiction from upstate RI. She is the author of 33 1/3: Soap Opera Sonnets. She is the creator of Cyjoe Barker, detective extraordinaire of stage and flash fiction. Feeling Plankton, a 10-minute play can still be viewed in its entirety here.

UNOPTIMISTIC DAY

by Barbara Schweitzer 

Tennessee Republicans’ ruthless use of their state House supermajority to expel two young Black lawmakers for breaching decorum exposed a torrent of political forces that are transforming American politics at the grassroots. The GOP action, after the lawmakers had led a gun control protest from the House floor in response to last week’s Nashville school shooting, created a snapshot of how two halves of a diversifying and increasingly self-estranged nation are being pulled apart. AP Photo by George Walker IV: Justin Jones, Gloria Johnson and Justin Pearson raise their hands outside the state House chamber after Jones and Pearson were expelled from the legislature on Thursday, April 6, 2023, in Nashville. —CNN, April 7, 2023

I read the political news
and then I worry.
I go upstairs to the writing
room and stare.
I kill a moth that has
flown by our tacky traps
in the hopes that it is
the last one so I might
again pull the cashmeres
(gifts over years)
out of the cedar trunk
yes cedar trunk but no
it does not protect.
Every November I see
the damage little things
can do, like worries,
wormholes in everyday:
how will we survive
inside all this hatred
what is wrong with humans
how can we believe in evolution
when lame brains govern
and all are men at the root
and they are not created
equal...  I must believe but... 
It is just that we are not winged
and we turn to dust so quickly
it takes only a finger to squash
a moth and just five pounds
of pressure on that finger 
to kill us. Guns and men 
who rule will soon too
be dust, unfortunately 
most not before us.

Barbara Schweitzer is the author of 33 1/3: Soap Opera Sonnets (Little Pear Press, 2008) and is now returning to poetry after a decade of writing (more or less) for theatre (which is a very different experience).

POST-THANKSGIVING 2020

by Barbara Schweitzer

“Only Human,” painting by Judith Dawson.

We are such little twisty things

protoplasm and cell productions

who eat turkey in November

and hotdogs in July

who love intensely our neighbor-in-bed

then plot coups with the Deplorables.

We are unthinkable most times

and dumb the rest

yet we climb and hope

and endure so that we might

not cascade into the smarmy oceans

we have made. We pick our way

so that we might reach an alp

and spread our small intelligences

like faraway stars into a universe.

We are just enough bare-boned and starving

to go on and on and on though we remain

still closer to slime than to god.

Barbara Schweitzer is still writing poems and plays and Cyjoe Barker mysteries in upstate RI.