THE INEQUITY OF JUSTICE

A Sestina

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

Dreams die in the blood of children,                                          

embryos born from the seeds of sorrow,

the milk of starvation, the torture

of chains and broken bones, the searching

of scorched earth; of survival as the “other.”

Mother and child, deported, disappear.

A cancer-ridden toddler and his mother disappear.
The video follows the mother, struggling to free her child
from the chains that bind them to “others,”
to the brutal and inhumane soldiers, deaf to sorrow,
prodding them toward a military plane, after searching
naked bodies with naked hatred as prodding guns torture
 
the nameless, bent and broken, then pack them in tortured
positions, until the engines roar, the plane lifts, and America disappears.
Activists march in the streets, carrying signs of protest, searching,
their eyes and ears alert to the danger of their neighbors. Children
and strangers in their midst, yet unaware of pain and sorrow, 
might be kidnapped, handcuffed, and thrown into cars with “others.”  
 
As if on cue, masked men swoop down upon “others,”
targets of skin and color, a mother and three daughters, tortured 
by HSI in their own home, left with smashed lives of fear and sorrow,
shivering in their underwear, in the rain, until the men with guns disappear,
leaving terror, and trauma cut with razor blades, on the backs of children
 looking for meaning in sleep, and awaken to desperate searching. 
 
Is there no end to a life whose desperate searching
leaves scars and barriers to block all “others,”
grieving as ICE hunts men, women, and children.?
The loss of deported loved ones enduring torture
affects human beings who mourn their disappearance,
and pursue justice in community and legal searches.?
 
Today, a Vermont man was not deported. Released from sorrow,
returning to his community which made, rehearsed, and researched 
plans to release him, they acted to assure his reappearance.
Hope returns with him, to all of us in helping “others”
escape the lawlessness of criminals in their acts of torturing
“Illegal aliens”, the name given to adults and innocent children.
 
            How much longer can children endure grief, sorrow, and torture?
Who will name these children? Why are they the “others”?  Has justice disappeared?

Lucille Gang Shulklapper is the published author of five chapbooks of poetry,  short stories, and picture books. Her work appears in journals, magazines, and online. She has taught reading from K-college, made recordings for the blind, and led workshops for The Florida Center for the Book, and others. Though she wrote from the age of six, she was never published until  the age of 60. Three decades later, she has started an Open Mic Poetry Program for her residential, and assisted living fellow retirees.   She lives in Boca Raton, Florida. 

JELLO JUSTICES

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

keep silent at night, and greet the day with judicial voice,

to make bounty hunters rejoice,

to welcome them to set new laws

that follow judicial and personal flaws

thinking they can sell it

if they can gel it

but we are women voters, not quivering or breaking

not wavering or shaking because

vigilante justice will not stand, 

you can't invade our bodies like a foreign land

we don't buy your brand.

 

Lucille Gang Shulklapper lives in Florida where she writes poetry and fiction.

A NIGHT AT THE RNC

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

Oh, say can you see, by dusk’s dimming light, fake news spewing from the worst on the right, from the Senate’s blind mice, ignoring all vice, the children in cages, the jobless... no wages, federal troops, crushing protest groups, voters’ hopes flailing, domestic terror prevailing.  Oh say, can you see, by dawn’s angry red glare, pollution and hatred on the air, in praise of T***p’s props and photo ops, truth denying, the sick and dying, our worst fears rearing, Kent State reappearing.

Aging rapidly, alternately sad, and depressed, Lucille Gang Shulklapper is at other times the fortunate author of numerous poems (a dozen or so published in TheNewVerse.News since 2008)and stories, as well as five poetry chapbooks and a picture book. She recently started a program in her residential community titled Edgewater Poets, giving seniors a voice on a community channel as well as the staff employed there. 

BOMB MAKERS

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

This is how the demagogues rose
with orange hair and Pinocchio nose
with wobbly chin and a plow that froze
one white woman and ten white men
who bent and bowed and said amen
to the free press, and the FBI,
to ethics and our flag flown high
to only abort
the supreme court.

Let the history books name
those leeches who brought shame
to facts in fake news voice
with dictators of their choice
who buried hopes with shoveled fears
who lost allies with unfit smears

who sent pipe bombs bombs from rhetoric born
from twisted minds to those they scorn
who leached democracy to death
who sucked its blood, its guts, its breath.

Lucille Gang Shulklapper's poetry and fiction  has appeared in numerous journals  including Slant, TheNewVerse.News, Lummox, and Poetic Voices without Borders.  Recent publications also include Gloss,  a fifth chapbook of poetry, and a picture book Stuck in Bed Fred. Presently, she is a volunteer with Caregiver Youth of America, and The Pap Corps. She has started a poetry column in her community newspaper and worries about deadlines or is it dead lines?

ELEGY FOR MY AMERICA

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

In this day of callous indifference,
in this day of sudden summer storms,
a little girl desires heart-showers,
seeks pillowed teardrops and yearns for

her beloved mother, in
this America we once valued,
now resting on balconies
built from stone,
once built from trees
with sheltered awnings.

She seeks the endurance of thought,
now ripped and torn
from their moorings.

What America wants and wanted,
sleeps the fitful sleep of near death.
Newborn birds call in her night.
Full-blown flowers die in her sun,
and America’s child is nobody’s child
when another’s child is buried
in hardened soil,
in cages and mylar
blankets of the unnamed.

Cry my beloved America,
as you struggle to shovel the dirt
to cover yourself. Silence falls
sharply. The greed of your shovel
buries you. Rest in peace.
Thoughts and prayers
are with you.

Lucille Gang Shulklapper's poetry and fiction have been anthologized and appear in numerous literary journals as well as in five collections of poetry and a picture book Stuck in Bed Fred.  Having written since she was six, but never published until she turned sixty, more than two decades ago, she urges her six grandchildren and many of her students to read and remember Langston Hughes' poem “Dreams”.

ELEGY FOR WASIL AHMAD

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

An image taken from social media shows the child soldier Wasil Ahmad being declared a hero last year for leading a militia’s defense against a Taliban siege. The Taliban announced on Monday that they had killed Wasil. —NY Times, Feb. 2, 2016

 Born into war,
    delivered by history, blood spilled
        with your birth, spattered on unseen hands.

The messengers raced away,
     gunmen on motorbikes, their message delivered
         two bullets to your head, no motorbike for

you, but a gun as big as  you were,
    a uniform made for a man, a helmet on your head,
        a child soldier, a human shield.  The Afghan government

has no details.  There will be
    an investigation of a child walking to his
        fourth-grade class. What did he see on his way?

Not the mountains in the distance,
    Not the flat land beneath his feet, not the
         hands of fruitless war,  only the marketplace of his world.


Lucille Gang Shulklapper’s work appears in numerous journals and anthologies, including TheNewVerse.News, Strand magazine, and Poetic Voices Without Borders, as well as in five poetry chapbooks and a picture book, Stuck in Bed Fred. Having taught reading K-college, made recordings for the blind, and raised a family, she is  presently a volunteer with Caregiver Youth of America.

EVERY DAY WE DIE A LITTLE, BURIED IN THE NEWS

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper





Every day we die a little, buried in the news,
suffocated by poison gas, kidnapped, beheaded,
bombed, burned alive, drowned,
struck by gunfire, massacred
in schools and shopping malls.
We are the nameless named by violence.

Four-year old Elliot Prior
at Nairobi's Westgate mall,
sees a jihadist wound his mother
with an assault rifle.  Angrily, he says,
"you are a very bad man."
The terrorist lets them escape.
Inside the carnage continues,
Outside are dead bodies,
The nameless cannot speak.

There are no brave four-year olds
in our bully pulpits, We are  hostages in
shopping malls.  Our names appear
in obituaries and on grave sites.
Our papered deaths roll to the curb
in black garbage cans.
Every day we die a little, buried in the news.


Lucille Gang Shulklapper's  poetry and fiction appears in many  journals including Slant, The New Verse News, and The Prose Poem Project, as well as in four poetry chapbooks.  She lives in Boca Raton, Florida.

FIDDLING WHILE NIGERIA BURNS

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

“Nigeria has ordered the closure of all secondary schools in Yobe state after Islamic extremists massacred 42 people at a boarding school in the region.” --The Independent (UK), 8 July 2013

Do you smell the stench, America?  in the vessels of fuel by Islamic extremists, in their vessels  of dried and fresh blood?  of burning flesh? of children at school? of wounded skin and bone? of ruptured tissue? of spilled brains? of a father's torment?  of seeing his two sons? who,  fleeing  fires of  Hell  are shot to death? hacked to pieces? do you hear their cries? smell embered hearts?  or is it a headline? buried with children? in fireworks of a different sort? the kind of American explosion in the sky? on the fourth of July? when we shoot the stars in bursts? when stepping  over ashes of Western civilization, we light our fires? fiddle with grills?  barbecue ribs buried in  smoky sauce? and  sniff the stifled air?   

 
Lucille Gang Shulklapper is a poet, fiction writer, workshop leader mother, and grandmother.

PREAMBLE

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, open our floodgates to end political confusion, we are neither props nor emotional blackmailers, we are citizen cops, and justice nailers, we are the ones who know, you can’t easily track bombs that blow, limbs and lives apart, without a heart, that the NRA has erased, by not allowing taggits in gunpowder to be traced,  that one of us found the tarp bloodied, one of us found Congress studied a poll and a vote, not the body in a boat, who represents our collective desire to demand,  in this our democratic hallowed land, our voice to be respected, from the officials we elected.

Lucille Gang Shulklapper writes poetry and fiction.  She has been published in many journals and anthologies, as well as in four poetry chapbooks.

HENNY-PENNY AND HER SEQUESTER WALK

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

Steve Sack, Cagle Cartoons, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

Silver-brittle sky-house snaps
handcuffs on its prisoners

the urgency of fear
startles some lizards

who walk on water  bodies  upright
escaping locomotion  no tracks

the fuchsia  impatiens
spills her blossoms onto brick

the sky is falling cries Henny-penny
I must warn the people

a duck rides a decoy like a horse
veering nowhere on its back

a boy fastens a target to a tree
alien green parrots scream

the needle sinks into the flesh
the arrow flies into the black

hungry pythons swallow deer
a dog named Forrest drowns

a child draws her lost cat
pointed ears small paws rounded eyes

she tapes it to a tree until its face
fades from it penciled tail

in a coat of oil a bird grows cold
its blackened wing remains

Henny-penny trips and falls
foxes make a meal of her

leave her carcass
on their party's trail

Lucille Gang Shulklapper has published short stories as well as four chapbooks of poetry, most recently, In the Tunnel, (March Street Press, 2008).  She has won awards and competitions from National League of Pen Women: Nob Hill Branch, Palm Beach Repertory Theater, the R. Rofihe Poetry Trophy, and others.  Her work has been anthologized and appears in many publications, including: Jerry Jazz Musician;  Poetic Voices Without Borders, Gulfstream and The Prose Poem Project. She has led workshops for The Florida Center for the Book, and workshops facilitated through The Palm Beach Poetry Festival.  Her first picture book, Stuck in Bed, Fred, has been accepted for publication in 2013.

CONCEAL AND CARRY

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

The families of victims grieve near Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a gunman opened fire on school children and staff in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012. Credit: Reuters/Adrees Latif

In a landmark announcement,  yesterday’s breaking news, licenses in Florida to conceal and carry, will reach one million, who’s willing to parry, as gun owners may also choose, to Stand Their Ground, and who will defend the dead victims found; who will speak for little children, in kindergarten class,  who dead and dying in numbers amass,  who clutching crayons and teddy bears, will carry horror in numbered  years,  who can no longer say, what we learned in Newton today, as gun fire boomed, and tiny bodies fell, who will give witness to what they can tell,  what they know and what they saw, who will add to the numbered law?


Lucille Gang Shulklapper is a poet , fiction writer , workshop leader, mother, and grandmother.