DID JUSTICE NOT MOAN?

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

An encounter in 2020 between a Jewish couple in Ijzim, Israel (south of Haifa) and the displaced Palestinians in whose house that couple has lived since 1948 when the Palestinians were denied the right to return to their village and property. Photo from an Al Jazeera video report. At YouTube, you can click on “SHOW MORE” to read an English translation of the Arabic narration.

Did their mothers tell them

Take whatever you want?

Did their fathers say

By any means necessary?

Did the god they concocted assure them

That they mattered more than anyone else?

Did the historians of erasure argue

That until they arrived the land was uninhabited?

Did the cartographers of eradication draw beautiful maps

Haunted by ghost villages?

Do the politicians they vote for promise

A sanitized future cleansed of the Other?

When they faced those they had dispossessed

And claimed not to give them a second thought

Did justice not moan?

Did righteousness not weep?

Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His new book is At the Driveway Guitar Sale: Poems on Aging, Memory, Morality (Main Street Rag Publishing). He podcasts at thirdactpoems.podbean.com and lives with his wife, Cynthia, in northern California.

LO & BEHOLD

by A.S. Coomer

The stick in the shit stirs,
swirling curdling fascinations,
condensing confections of confusion,
mingling malice with malignancies
so potent the stirrer wears a mask,
a mask of indifference,
a mask of superiority,
a mask haloed orange like the burnt offering,
some poor hamster caught, killed and propped up as a sacrifice
atop the altar of jingoism,
we all feel uncomfortable seeing,
a mask bought & sold & held over our heads
higher than our grubby, working hands can reach.
A mask atop a mask atop a mask.
I’ll turn my bare face to the sun before I wear one.

The stick in the shit stirs,
the stained hand is attached to a stained arm
and the poison courses deep through the veins of a man
in thousand dollar suits, a shark’s grin & puckered lips,
eyes seeing only various shades of green & red,
a man in a mask with a stick in his hand,
selling shit cakes to the empty bellied, to the disenfranchised,
to the misinformed & the uninformed, to the belligerent,
to those holding onto the last vestiges of power by the skin
of their privileged, primered nails.
Shit cakes. For one & all. Shit cakes by the dozens. Thousands. Millions.
I’ll take my turn at the soup lines before I have one.

A.S. Coomer is a native Kentuckian serving out a purgatorial existence somewhere in the Midwest. His work has appeared in over thirty publications. He’s got a handful of novels that need good homes. He also runs a “record label” for poetry.