THE MORNING AFTER

by Donna Katzin

The New Yorker cover by Malika Favre

 

We celebrate Hartz Mountain worker-women

in the pet food factory in Hackensack,

treated worse than the dogs they fed,

their every move, bathroom break

surveilled by bosses when they

dared to organize a union.

 

We give thanks for Irene Eaglin,

who came north on rails of Jim Crow,

scrubbed white women’s floors with calloused hands,

wore a pink uniform that marked her as a servant,

taught the pale child in her charge

about the Klan and apartheid.

 

We remember the children of Soweto,

commemorated by museum garden stones,

who marched by the hundreds in blizzards of bullets,

armed with chants and posters claiming

the right to learn in their own tongue

and to grow up.

 

In solidarity, we honor Victor Jara,

in the Santiago stadium, where he sang

against the dictator to horror-stricken fans

who looked on as torturers mangled his body,

and he played liberation songs on his guitar

with broken hands.

 

We bow our heads today

for 18 year-old Neveah Crain,

hours after her Texas baby shower,

when sepsis set in, lingered, and doctors

refusing to remove the “unviable fetus”

from her womb, let them both die.

 

We write epic poems to Kamala, a woman of color

who ran to run our fragile, fractured nation

 where men afraid to let a woman lead

chose instead to listen to propaganda

to hide the timorous family member

trembling between their own legs.

 

We welcome them all to stand with us now

in a parched land we scarcely recognize,

scarred by the lust for profit and power,

oil and blood, that has left us searching

for our voices and each other,

thirsting for the rain.

 

Donna Katzin is a published poet and contributor to The New Verse News. She served for 26 years as executive director of Shared Interest, which does community development and investment work in South Africa, having previously worked for the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility as director of South Africa and International Justice Programs, after organizing for the UAW. She is a member of the Reforming Judaism's Tikkun Olam Commission, working on reparations in the U.S., and co-chairs Tipitapa Partners, empowering grassroots women in Nicaragua. Her book of poems and photographs With These Hands chronicles post-apartheid South Africa's process of giving birth to itself.

ELECTION NIGHT AFTER DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS

by Jan Steckel

A blazing stateroom of clapping blondes. 

The President dropped the match. The windows 

blew out like a thousand Kristallnachts.

 

My husband slept through the little Hiroshima.

In the morning we’d have to pour into the streets.

I tried to curl up like the cat and snooze.

 

But voices whispered, “Anyone can march. 

Take up your pen. Write an anthem we can

sing again.” Dead poets filled my bedroom.

 

Victor Jara lifted broken hands.

García Lorca slid down a bullet-riddled wall.

Mandelstam starved and shivered in a transit camp.

 

My dead friend, Berkeley poet Julia Vinograd,

read new poems in my dream, turned to me. 

“Open your mouth,” she said. So hear me:

 

Tomorrow some will march, some write, 

and others sing. Though glass and bone shatter,

America will never bear another king.

Jan Steckel’s book Like Flesh Covers Bone won 2019 Rainbow Awards for LGBT Poetry and Best Bisexual Book. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital also won awards. She lives in Oakland, California.