The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
Guidelines
Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
My friend texts: It was great. But today I got a terrible news from Ukraine. My best best friend was killed by Russian soldiers. So, all my good memories about graduating just disappeared I call her. She says she doesn’t want to talk. I call her the next day, she says she still doesn’t want to talk. I don’t know how to write a poem right now. Another friend calls. She was a refugee from Iraq. Her house was burned down there. She says it’s hard to talk about, that forever she’s felt silenced. I feel the need to write poetry. I cannot handle history. I don’t know how to cope other than through poetry. I had a meeting recently where I talked about what happened to us in the military. I told the woman sitting in front of me that I couldn’t talk about it for decades I’d get aphasia. I couldn’t speak. I’d want to speak, but I couldn’t speak. During those decades, I wrote poems. Not enough people read poems. Poems sometimes are the silenced trying to speak when their voice is being choked, when their words are being taken by history. Like now.
“For heaven’s sake…” it’s true, we are all going to die. But how and why, under what circumstances? Accidental death has its own brand of horror for those left behind in the aftermath. Diseases can ravage, destroy in torturous chronologies of lifetimes, or swoop in all teeth and talons at birth, suffering without boundaries or lines of defense.
We say, For heaven’s sake, let’s help! Let’s not walk among the dead and say we’ve all got it coming. Let’s renounce cruelty, callous equations by riffraff imposters who spew bilious indifference toward the sick, whose stone hearts will someday be erased on the site of an unmarked grave in the canon of history.
Pamela Kenley-Meschino is originally from the UK, where she developed a love of nature, poetry, and music, thanks in part to the influence of her Irish mother. She is an educator whose classes explore the connection between writing and healing and the importance of shared stories.
France plans to build a maximum-security prison wing for drug traffickers and Islamic militants near a former penal colony in French Guiana, sparking an outcry among residents and local officials. The wing would form part of a $450 million prison announced in 2017 that is expected to be completed by 2028 and hold 500 inmates. The prison would be built in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, a town bordering Suriname that once received prisoners shipped by Napoleon III in the 1800s, some of whom were sent to the notorious Devil's Island off the coast of French Guiana… It was once an infamous colony known for holding French political prisoners, including Captain Alfred Dreyfus (above left), who was wrongly convicted of being a spy and spent five years on Devil's Island, from 1894-1899. —Le Monde, May 20, 2025. Henri Charrière was convicted of murder in 1931 by the French courts and pardoned in 1970. He wrote the 1969 novel Papillon, a memoir of his incarceration in French Guiana.
The butterfly knows no death in its metamorphosis.
It knows it will rise again with the certainty of Papillon now.
And as he rises to tell his story history repeats again.
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.
It seems that long ago, there was a strong streak of antisemitism in Egypt. Something about domestic servitude. Lots of salty sweat; construction jobs performed by undocumented people. A labor leader arose—the usual kind of suspect: Jewish, bearded, an immigrant, messianic inclinations —and he called a strike. There were threats of retribution. There were counter-threats, something about nasty stuff, plagues.
Death threats, sacrificial animals, an angel making overhead surveillance flights— possible early versions of Jewish space lasers— lambs' blood smeared on doorways, a kind of warning, a kind of sign to leave us alone. Then there was an expulsion order. Many waters to cross... that kind of thing. The people crossed over. It was not the Hudson. The promised land was not, contrary to rumors, New Jersey.
Apparently, some of the descendants of the people who got across the water are now persecuting another people —also Semites, as it turns out—who live where the former slaves’ ancestors used to live. It is a sad cycle.
Those who have a sense of history and its tragic ironies now raise their wine glasses and say, with tears in their eyes, Oy vey. We should know better. We could do a lot better than this.
Author's note: Midrash: an ancient commentary on part of the Hebrew scriptures, attached to the Biblical text.
Joel Savishinsky is a retired professor of anthropology and gerontology, and the author of the collection Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his work has appeared in The New York Times, Passager, and Willawaw. His book Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, won the Gerontological Society of America’s annual book award. He has been leading family Passover Seders for many years.
Is now, always has been again… not me but history.
This is why powers that be don’t want it taught in school.
Now history is screaming haves vs. have-nots.
A white wine reduction and garlic should do the trick.
Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, writer, dad, husband, and a man of few words but many syllables. Google ‘scott kaestner poetry’ to peruse his musings and doings—maybe even buy a book.
To the women in the Vietnam memorial: One of you holds the dying soldier, one hand to his chest. One hand, not two. You seem to know he is beyond CPR, past the point where anything can save him. The new volunteer who crouches behind you, stricken, in her fresh fatigues and boonie hat, must know this too, green as she is. Your hand rests on his shrapnel-filled chest not to rescue, but to comfort, to say, “You’re not alone.” Your sister-in-arms who’s become the best friend you’ll ever have, lays her hand along your arm for mutual comfort and support as she calls for help out of habit in her resonant voice. To a compatriot: “Need a doctor over here!” To the universe: “Enough! For the love of God, enough!”
In a time when petty tyrants rewrite history to suit their bigotry, your granite tableau stands solid in resistance.
Kay White Drew is a retired physician whose poems appear in various anthologies andinternet outlets including The NewVerse News. She’s also published short stories and several essays, one of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize,and a memoir, Stress Test. She lives in Rockville, MD with her husband. Spending time in nature helps her stay sane in these difficult days.
my country is busy writing out history 1.women 2.immigrants 3.ukraine so I must write them in grandma sophie checks these boxes one two three she left the shtetl in 1893 for the american dream she fled 1.pogroms 2.despots 3.poverty she arrived by 1.horse and wagon 2.train 3.ship violently assaulted violated a #metoo moment before we could speak such things aloud my grandmother kept her life lost a life silenced in pursuit of 1.love 2.safety 3.family silenced by shame she never spoke her trauma but passed it down on top of the genes episilencing generations 1.ancestors 2.descendants 3.ascendance through no fault of her own and now her landsman this democratically elected leader of a free country symbolized by the sunflower source of seeds and oil hearth and home like sophie symbols of peace and resilience comes to defend freedom and dignity for all not to grovel at the tsar’s feet violently assaulted violated an #ustoo moment we must speak aloud I call out the horror sophie’s story is america’s story truth trauma triumph and all i am writing herstory 1.SOPHIE her name 2.PROUD her legacy 3.AMERICA her goldene medina episilenced #nomore
Sophie
Robin Stevens Payes is a time traveler who reasons that time and space are just inconvenient rules that other people decided the world must follow. After decades of trying to fit some notion of “normal” she chose to dive deeper into the offbeat, allowing verse to fill a poetic void. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies: Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She is time traveling to retrieve fragments of her grandmother Sophie’s story in [re]member the world, weaving together poetry, memoir, history and science. She writes about the process of weaving memory into a tapestry on her Substack https://remembertheworld.substack.com/
The bison. The grizzly bears. The jaguars that can’t leap over the wall along the border river. I will miss reading irreverent books. Novels where Jesus has a friend named Biff. Comic books where Deadpool is a hero. I will miss news reporters who know that Kansas City is in Missouri and that Benjamin Franklin never resided in the White House. I will miss the White House. The Smithsonian, the Statue of Liberty, and Yellowstone. I will wonder how Old Faithful might be disappeared. I will miss pennies. And the Beatitudes, the part of the Bible Kurt Vonnegut valued the most. I will miss voting for women. I will miss movies that tell the stories of men and women who don’t look like me. I will miss being able to see Venus and Mars on clear nights. I will miss strawberries and tomatoes and watermelons and sweet potatoes and cranberries and sunflowers and cherries. I will miss guitars with This Machine Kills Fascistsscrawled across their bodies. I will miss dogs that look more like wolves than weapons of war. I will miss saying Feliz Navidad, Fröhliche Weihnachten, and Mele Kalikimaka. I will miss finger-pointing songs. I will miss licorice. Yes, I will even miss licorice.
Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana, His prose poems have appeared in Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Red Eft Review, and Unlikely Stories Mark V. Brockley's prose poems are also forthcoming in Ley Lines Literary Review, Seat at the Table, and Alien Buddha.
Even a perfect census will not put out the fire burning in the Nationalist heart.
Nooses, confederate flags, swastikas
stoke a malicious wind, tease stray embers ablaze,
decency, fairness torched, the dead mourned in time
to welcome the next batch of flatliners,
school children hiding from bullets, dead folk in synagogues, movies or concerts,
and caravans of the desperate who wonder how close to an embryo
must one be to claim the right to life? America, dear,
our once noble experiment is choking on the foul air
in the autocratic wastebin of greed and bigotry.
Sure, we will count heads, tally up racial ancestry,
count votes, count the dead, but will we learn
why, oh why, are so many sucking the poison
from the orange beast’s burning breast while Momma’s milk curdles and dries up?
Anita S Pulier’s chapbooks Perfect Diet, The Lovely Mundane and Sounds of Morning and her books The Butchers Diamond and Toast were published by Finishing Line Press. Paradise Reexamined came out in 2023 (Kelsay Books). Her new book Leaving Brooklyn is due in Jan '25 from Kelsay Books Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily.
