The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
Guidelines
Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com. No simultaneous submissions. Use "Verse News Submission" as the subject line. Send a brief bio. No payment. Authors retain all rights after 1st-time appearance here. Scroll down the right sidebar for the fine print.
David Radavich's poetry collections include two epics, America Bound and America Abroad, as well as Middle-East Mezze and The Countries We Live In. His latest book is Unter der Sonne / Under the Sun: German and English Poems (2022).
“With war in Ukraine, editors help kids cope with scary news.” —News Decoder, February 25, 2022
We have failed you,
utterly.
We sold you a fairy tale: Once upon a time,
all children were created equal.
We proclaimed your bodies, your lives
as sovereign. Daughters,
that is no longer true. Black and brown sons,
we know it never was.
We have fiddled while the west burns,
the east floods, the poles dissolve.
We watched our elders succumb to pandemic
while we fought over masks. Lost
our children to weapons of death while
we debated the definition of
assault rifles. We wait –
we wait—as you are picked off
one by one.
Child, the barbarians have breached the gates.
The monster is in your classroom.
Dread seeps into your sleep.
Jabberwock has grown a new head,
is assembling his army of minions.
How can we possibly
console you?
You need to grow up,
quickly now. Leave us, the weak-willed
and stunned.
Take up your pen and shield, unleash
your small voices, amass in great numbers.
Demand we step aside.
You are your only hope.
Author’s Note: Above is a poem I wrote in response to the deluge of bad news lately, culminating in the Supreme Court Decision. The poem—and my title—is inspired by the barrage of media articles that always come on the heels of unimaginable news, and which are headlined along the variation of: "What to tell children when the news is scary."
Diane Dolphin is a poet, writer, and former college instructor from Warwick, RI.
Charles Hughes has published two books of poems, The Evening Sky (2020) and Cave Art (2014), both from Wiseblood Books. He worked for over thirty years as a lawyer and now works at writing poems.
A.G. Bill Barr
should be disbarred
and/or spend time
behind bars or
drinking at them,
both earnest and glib.
doing biddings of
our worst President,
bar none.
For lack of Barack,
step up, be heard;
raise the bar of expectations.
Climb the barricades.
High jump, pole-jump:
clear the bar.
Cross the bar.
Nearly half of us
fear barbarian hordes,
beards and all (unless
us is them). Seek to
bar the gate, build barriers.
Keep us over barrels, where
barrels are meant for
storing and protecting,
e.g. over Niagara;
or for shooting fish,
or empty ones for noise.
The BAR man sights down
his ungainly weapon
(though Browning Automatic Rifle
has nothing to do with “baros,”
Greek for weight).
Bars of gold, candy, or soap.
Bars of music and rank.
Barcode. Bar-
gain. Crow, salad,
barbell and barometer.
Stars and bars forever.
Barbed. Barred.
Democracy amok.
DeWitt Henry’s most recent prose collection is Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays (MadHat, 2018). A new collection, Endings and Beginnings: Family Essays, is scheduled for 2020 from MadHat. Poems have appeared in Ibbetson Street, On the Seawall, Plume, Muddy River Poetry Review, Constellations, and Woven Tale Press. Henry was the founding editor of Ploughshares and is Prof. Emeritus at Emerson College.
Oct. 27, 2018 Squirrel Hill is home to a large Jewish population. Above, Tree of Life synagogue.Pam Panchak/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/AP via The Washington Post
Jews are being slaughtered again, ho hum –
In serene leafy Squirrel Hill this time
After days of pipe-bomb deliveries
To Dem bigwigs, enemies of the T***p state,
As reported by those enemies of the state,
The media; now the Jews again, those
Enemies out of central casting always
On call for the demented demons
Of domination as they once again
Focus their hatred and execute scapegoats
In the name of some Judenfrei utopia
That can never exist, because once
Judenrein, those left will turn on the weak
And most despised among them
And the executions will begin again…
So don’t look for barbarians at the gate
They already are right here inside –
Inside our borders, inside our hearts
George Held, a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News, writes from New York. His twentieth collection is Dog Hill Poems (Seattle, 2017). Under the Escalator, his dark fantasy for children, came was released last month.
DREAMING OF RETIREMENT I THINK OF DU FU by Maryann Corbett
NPR Headline, June 27, 2017: “President Trump Looks to Slash Nearly 4000 Interior Department Jobs”
Tell me, venerable poet, how did you cope
with changes of regime?
Did you hear, in the gardens of Chang’an,
when men in new silk robes
spoke your name and snickered?
Did they practice, in their graceful calligraphy,
the characters for cutting the fat?
For starving the beast?
Did you watch as others suffered,
like you, demotion and disgrace?
You, too, longed for peace,
for a farm, a thatched cottage, the sound of a stream.
Teach me how you mastered yourself
so as to leave us poems of a thousand years
of rivers, moonlight, compassion.
Teach me how you knew it was time at last
to flee before the barbarians.
Video by the Bureau of Land Management published on Nov 10, 2016. In June 2017, T***p's Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told lawmakers . . . "that he plans to shrink his department’s sprawling workforce by 4,000 employees—about 8 percent of the full-time staff—as part of budget cuts to downsize the government’s largest public lands agency. . . . 1,000 jobs would be lost at the Bureau of Land Management—which manages hundreds of wilderness areas, two dozen national monuments and other protected lands in addition to issuing leases for livestock grazing and oil and gas extraction —according to an email its acting director sent to employees last Friday." —The Washington Post, June 21, 2017
Maryann Corbett is grateful that in fact she's already retired from almost 35 years of work with the Minnesota Legislature. Her newest book Street View: Poems is available from Able Muse Press.
