WARM AND CUDDLY BELONGING FOR ALL

by Lynne Barnes

 

 

A hospital patient who managed to talk a man out of detonating a bomb in a maternity wing said the would-be attacker “asked for a cuddle” before standing down. Nathan Newby, who stopped an atrocity through an act of kindness, spoke publicly for the first time about his encounter with Mohammad Farooq before receiving the George Medal [from King Charles, above] for bravery. Farooq, a clinical support worker who took a viable pressure cooker bomb into St James’s hospital in Leeds intending to “kill as many nurses as possible” was jailed for at least 37 years last year. After asking for a cuddle, Farooq told Newby to “phone the police before I change my mind.’ —The Guardian, March 24, 2026

 

 

Oh, the layers of life right now—
sweet family visit with my
thirty-something god-nephew
and our goddess-niece, his wife.
Calming, evocation of
belonging, togetherness, as we
commune deeply with them.
They are artists, teachers, such
loving creatures, here with their
stray-rescued-as-a-puppy-ten-years-ago,
Navajo, to spend the night with us.
 
Bearing down on that layer is
a dangerous one above it,
malignant, narcissistic,
Machiavellian, sadistic,
hanging by a thread—
a heavy concrete cloud,
just above our heads,
visible, threatening,
seeded with stress and dread.
I fly above into
the stratosphere of compassion,
look down through the conflicting,
complex layers of our
human race in this era.
 
Kindness, not war and hate, 
rescues minds from harmful ideas.
Will we learn to weave empathic ropes
to throw, not just to those we love,
but to those who other us as well?
 
Can humanity, we, reel away from our
constant collapse into competing cultiness,
a tendency in all of us?
 
Broader belonging, expansive,
Transcendent Human Tribe is now
our mental moon shot challenge.
 
How will it come? I wonder as I land
back on earth from my imaginary
skyward travel. Perhaps
 
Eroding Othering
should be a sibling category
to the Nobel Prize for Peace.
 
All this I think as anxious rescue Navajo
finally stops pacing, settles out of her
traumatic memories of her early life
on the reservation, on the streets—
packless, othered, bitten, diseased.
 
At last, she welcomes our acceptance,
lets us pet her, relaxes on her
fluffy, gray, perfect circle of bed.

Lynne Barnes' poetry memoir Falling into Flowers won the 2017 Goodreads Rainbow Award for Best Gay and Lesbian Poetry, was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Awards, and received Honorable Mention in both the Gay and Poetry categories for the 2018 San Francisco Book Festival Awards. 

USAID

by Lynne Barnes

Cleveland Clinic

(Understanding Unloved-Unloving, Untreated, Up-thrust Sociopaths Always Injure & Destroy)

 

1.

U and I have been

Sending

Aid to

Individuals

Destitute around the world, for

Decades.

 

Donald is now at the helm of our ship of state,

Doing away with our helping hand, and the

Death toll is hundreds of thousands so far.

Destined to reach 14 million over what will be the next

Dreadful ten years if we don’t resist, re-find and restore our

Democracy’s humanitarian kindness.

 

Unless we persist, prevent this, we are

Sliding into

An era of 

Intense, horrific

Destruction and death around our globe.

 

2.

Dark Triad is not a diagnosis,

            but a poem, penned by psychologists—

            a metaphor for a group of traits.

 

Dark Triad humans—

Deny

Devalue

Distract

Dominate

Deviate, fall into

Dysfunction.

Dark Triad is narcissism, psychopathy, and

            Machiavellianism intertwined.

 

Dark Tetrad adds a verse to the poem—

            Sadism— pleasure at the suffering of others.

 

            We must

 

Disarm Donald, our fellow damaged,

        handicapped human, remove him from his

            legal and military commands, and

 

            pray that we never allow a

Dark triad/tetrad human, incapable of empathy, to

Dump shit on us ever again.

Lynne Barnes is a retired psychiatric nurse and librarian living in San Francisco, honored that her poems have appeared in past months in The New Verse News. Her poetry memoir, Falling Into Flowers (Blue Light Press, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Award.

AFTER SEEING “THE CRUCIBLE” PERFORMED BY STUDENTS OF SAN FRANCISCO CITY COLLEGE

by Lynne Barnes

I felt challenged at first

by the language of the play.

I came to it weary, exhausted really,

no fault of the author or actors.

 

It is just so troubling now, out here

in humanity’s sad tilt toward cruelty.

This weighs on us all,

whether we recognize it or not,

like a season of dreary weather.

 

Arthur Miller’s complex word tapestry,

and the actors embodying his characters,

took our minds deep inside the insanity

of the Salem Witch Trials

echoing McCarthy’s time, and

reflecting our present moment

in a stunning mirror of art.

 

My mask muffled an involuntary

keening sound as the curtain fell.

 

Oh, dear playwright, dear actors,

dear visual, verbal musicians,

you struck soul-deep,

vibrating our collective psyche

as your high notes of sorrow’s music

hit like a fist to our chests.

 

Afterward, as we mingle with the cast,

bees of gratitude fly from our lips,

swarm our senses, pollinate

our newly watered, unfolding,

buds of resilience.

Author’s Note: This poem came first, followed several weeks later by this news article out of my home state of Georgia. Since this is graduation month, I decided to send along my poem and the link to this article about the disappointed students, ironically victims of the kind of witch hunt mentality Arthur Miller depicted so enduringly in "The Crucible."

Silencing the Witches in Georgia High School ‘Crucible’: And so it seems that the play about witch hunts, about the persecution of people out of hysteria, despite being an acknowledged American classic widely taught in high school classrooms and performed frequently on high school stages, had provoked the same moral persecution it portrayed as unjust. —Howard Sherman, May 22, 2025

Lynne Barnes is a retired psychiatric nurse and librarian living in San Francisco. She is especially honored that two of her poems have appeared in the past in The New Verse News. Her poetry memoir, Falling into Flowers (Blue Light Press, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Award.

WHAT POPE LEO MIGHT BE THINKING

by Lynne Barnes

Your mother was ill and away

when you were very little.

Did this mean that one of your

foundation beams was laid out as clay,

creating that listing psychic gait

that seems to have hobbled you

since toddlerhood?

 

Your early language threw darts

of defense against harm inside

your family’s nest of punishment

alternating with neglect.

You began sharpening knives

of revenge, destructiveness

back then, just to survive.

As you matured, you were mentored

by those who were traumatized like you.

 

Oh, if only your resilient spirit had been

gifted just a little more warmth

at your first hearth, perhaps your sense of

self-worth would not have become pea-sized,

inside and protected by, a hot air balloon.

Heated molecules of fear inflate

that bubble of space around your core.

 

Your borders are so thin and vulnerable

that you must strike first, slur people away

to feel safe, and your re-tells of conversations

all have others referring to you as sir.

 

You use loser, lowlife, liddle, lightweight,

for others. And for yourself you say

tremendous, perfect, winner, greatest,

and speak with clueless pride

that other humans kiss your ass.

 

You, dear sir, learned so early to strike first,

before anyone could breach your fragile border,

see the size of your ego infirmity,

but now, power has enriched, fused your childhood’s

uranium grains into a global nuclear cruelty.

 

We must fight, drain your power, disarm you whose wounds

block you from the language of human love and care.

As we face off we’re terrified, but also Sad!—witnessing

a fellow human walled off from the beauty of empathy as prayer.

Lynne Barnes is a retired psychiatric nurse and librarian who has lived in San Francisco since 1969. Her poetry memoir, Falling into Flowers (Blue Light Press, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Award.

HEALTH ALERT BULLETIN CONCERNING CAPITOL CLIMATE CHANGE

by Lynne Barnes

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

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

Be advised:

 

Now is a time of high stress.

It’s in the air like smoke and ash.

You must mask while you’re out

and get inside as soon as you can.

 

Get inside circles of humans who see, know

who you are, circles of people who allow you

to share your emotions and thoughts.

 

Sharing inside circles of trust

can boost your immune system,

help neutralize the pollution

of this air we are breathing now,

 

air hazy with particulate matter of fear

that has come upon us suddenly

in this last half of

the month of January, 2025.

 

Take care.

Lynne Barnes is a retired psychiatric nurse and librarian who has lived in San Francisco since 1969. Her poetry memoir, Falling into Flowers (Blue Light Press, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Award.