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.

7.4.22

by Don Brunnquell

Terrified paradegoers fled the Highland Park, Ill., Fourth of July event after shots were fired Monday. At least six people were dead, more than 40 people were hospitalized and a gunman was at large Monday afternoon after shooting Fourth of July paradegoers from a roof in this Chicago suburb, authorities said. (Photo: Lynn Sweet/AP via The Washington Post, July 4, 2022)

            In the dark times

            Will there be singing?

            Yes, there will be singing.

            About the dark times.

—Bertolt Brecht, “Motto”

 

Oh, say can you see, on this day

we celebrate what we used to call

one nation, with liberty and justice

for all, from every mountainside

let us sing all the songs our country

has earned, not only O beautiful

for spacious skies, but the mourning

dirge for today’s dead in Chicago parading

beside us with the children of Uvalde

and the spirit of George Floyd, not only

“Columbia the Gem of the Ocean”

but Woody’s “I Ain’t  Got No Home,”

and with fitting irony This land is your

land, this land is my land, recalling

whose land this really was, every verse

written on the mounds of the old bones.

Perhaps sing “You’re a Grand Old Flag”

not for the flag worship of the title,

but the lines, forever in peace

may you wave, and never a boast

or brag, sing “We Shall Overcome,”

but also the source of its tune,

“No More Auction Block For Me.”

All the songs need to be sung,

then return to “America the Beautiful,”

the closing lines of the second verse,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law. 

Don Brunnquell is a poet working in Saint Paul, MN after careers in pediatric psychology and bioethics.  He is one of the coordinators of the Midstream Poetry Series in the Twin Cities. 

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY8 MARCH 2022

by Mary K O'Melveny

Today, please celebrate all

the women we have lost.

In every war and cease fire.

On slaver’s ships. On thirsty

desert treks to walled borders.

In back-alley rooms without

anesthesia. Locked in basements,

without papers or escape routes.

Asleep in bed. Hitching a ride.

Nursing bruises or starving babies.

 

Our losses rise like mountain peaks.

Ukrainian women huddle in subways,

clutch children, family pets, a few

hastily gathered objects from lives

they will likely never know again

or tattered photographs of loved ones

they may never see again. Even in

safer worlds, friends die of causes

that repurposed money, refocused

attention could have remedied.

 

Some fade away from neglect,

inattention, dreams downsized

by school guidance counselors,

religious zealots, patriarchy.

Others drop dead without a whimper

on a sun-dappled afternoon. One friend’s

memories vanished by midnight

stroke; another’s by subtle daily

erasures. Open our mouths wide in

praise of all. Let songbirds loose.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her most recent poetry collection is Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum, just out from Kelsay Books. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

FOR MATTHEW SHEPARD

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

On October 26, 2018 at 10:00 am Washington National Cathedral hosts a Service of Thanksgiving and Remembrance for Matthew Shepard, whose brutal death in 1998 shocked the world, grieved the Church and mobilized the LGBTQ movement. The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, and the Right Rev. V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay man elected a bishop in The Episcopal Church, will preside. The service is free and open to the public, and passes are not required. Following the public service, the Shepard family will attend private interment service in the Cathedral crypt. Watch live online: https://youtu.be/FSXtHMXuaPI

                                finally 
                                     you will rest
                after the weight of some twenty years
                                     as God’s light scatters color
                through hallowed glass
                  within the cycle of other calendared events
                future festivals will frame your ashes
                liturgy will celebrate each change of season
                morning prayer and even song will hinge the hours . . .
                from now on
                                     how many visitors will walk among the silences
                          and finding your name     will pause to remember your life,
                                    your costly pain
                and death
                with its unanswerable why
                                     yet    under its ashen skin
                                     there still pulses that fragile thing we call hope . . .
                          matthew
                                     today this sacred space welcomes you home

Sister Lou Ella Hickman is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and TheNewVerse.News as well as in the anthologies The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannnan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recover for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo. Last year she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published by Press 53 in 2015.

CHOSEN VENUES

by Joan Colby


Where you are dancing.
Where you celebrate.
Where the bands play.
Where you congregate for coffee
Or conversation. Or to view the match
Or the marathon.
Anywhere you go to enjoy
Invites the strike. The explosive vest
Or car aimed at the thick of things.
What they seek to destroy is this:
Free pleasure. The authoritarian shift
To beheadings in an arena
Where you learn what to expect.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press), Dead Horses and Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), and Properties of Matter (Aldrich Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.