PITY THE NATION

by Kent Reichert

after Kahlil Gibran

after Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Pity the nation whose people look and speak and act alike,
embracing white as the color without hue.
Whose citizens chant in auditoriums,
as if the act of uttering the words
will make it so.
Whose minds, in the light of day,
shutter themselves from its rays,
preferring darkness as their dwelling.
Whose sacred books,
transformed into photographs,
are impotent.
Who fabricate fanciful explanations
atop a single grain of sand,
and cloak their ignorance in veneers of “rights” and “freedoms.”
Pity the nation whose lawmakers
bury their discerning eyes in graves of party
genuflecting to the loudest, vulgar voice
in fawning adoration at the words,
“…for I alone can save you!”
Pity the nation whose leader paints only forgeries
and whose citizens cry, “Masterpiece!”
Who fondle each new lie in bed at night,
seduced by its base allure.
Pity the nation to whom the glory of the myth
is the only truth.


Kent Reichert is retired from schools but not from words. His poems have appeared in The Dead Mule.  He is the author of two chapbooks, Soon Ah will be done… and Chronology of Spirits.

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND

by Dawn Corrigan

“Rat Race to the Meaning of Life” by Channing.

   I am waiting   for the Age of Anxiety   to drop dead   —Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "I Am Waiting" 1958

I keep hearing parents
fretting if they don't send
their children to school
they'll fall behind.

Parents, I bring you news:
The rat race is over.
The rats won.
Time for something else now.


Dawn Corrigan is waiting, too.

FULL CENTURY

by Howard Winn

In honor of Lawrence Ferlinghetti at one hundred years.

has receded into history
and the beat goes on
although by now all his disciples
have passed out of the San
Francisco air of what was
once the unfashionable district
until the boys and girls of
the computer culture in the
Silicon Valley began seeking
sophistication and superiority
leaving the famous bookstore
where world changing verse
and fiction issued forth
brightening the shop window
of that literary cradle of the hip
and the mind of the rebels who
have along with the city itself turned
on the lights of sensation and
changed the very character of culture
way beyond the aura of sophistication
that made the city at the top
of that green peninsula the center
of the new culture that swept
both state and country and the world
never to be forgotten or erased


Howard Winn's poetry has been published most recently in Evening Street Review and Adelaide Literary Journal.