EQUITY AND TOLERANCE

FOR STONEWALL

by Roberta Batorsky

 

 

Three days after the Trump administration removed a Rainbow Flag from the Stonewall National Monument, defiant activists hoisted the Rainbow Flag once again in front of a jam-packed crowd of fed-up LGBTQ community members who flooded the area surrounding Christopher Park.  Photo by Donna Aceto. —Gay City News, February 12, 2026

Bury the flag of empathy,
it no longer belongs here.
Turn its rainbow black—
disavow the pride it gave
commemorating AIDS victims,
lives lost as in a war.
and it was a war, unended, unwon.
 
Pull the emblem of suffering
of men, women and children,
renew the prejudice that killed
Oscar*, Alan** and others,
deliver it with its own symbol
of derision and weakness.
 
It wasn’t Ellen D***. that convinced us,
Matt Shepard’s death didn’t convince us:
something fundamentally changed then.
Now bathroom jokes, lewdness, shame,
insinuation, guilt and closeting
all shift to the front burner.
 
Bury the flag of concern for people
deep in the heart of the heart of this country.
 
See us now, re-emerging, colors blazing,
in freedom’s garb,
to shake off erasure,
proclaiming our unity:
Our city, our flag.
 
 
*Oscar Wilde
** Alan Turing
*** Ellen Degeneres

 

 

Roberta Batorsky, a New Jersey poet, has published this month her first book of poetry, Perihelion.

ZERO IN THE CEMETERY

by Carolyn Gregory 

Nocturnal Sunrise by Alison Strange-Green

The angels at Pere Lachaise Cemetery
weep this morning,
tears glued frozen to classic features,
wings unable to fly.

They are mourning the dead journalists
who were too saucy with cartoons,
lambasting the prophet
when thousands die under drones
in trenched caverns in Syria.

One man's religion is not
another man's feast to roast and ride
when children and women drop
at weddings and in small cells.

The angels light the graves
of Oscar Wilde and the French Resistance,
stones shining above snow

and then they retreat
to melancholy for this season of violence,
wings bent down with grief.


Carolyn Gregory's poems and essays on music have been published in American Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, Bellowing Ark, Seattle Review, and Stylus. She was featured in For Lovers and Other Losses. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry in 2011 and is a past recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award. Her book, Open Letters, was published by Windmill Editions in 2009 and her next, Facing the Music, in 2012. She has been working on a series about the history of guns in America for several years now.