PITY THE NATION

an update

by Kent Reichert 

to his August 25, 3020 New Verse News poem

after Kahlil Gibran

after Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Pity the nation who despises “the other,”
who returns to a past that never was,
where everyone knew their place
and the uncomfortable facts
have been replaced with patriotic fantasies,
as if flags and hats and colors and slogans
are the qualities of true citizenship.

Pity the nation that clings to fictional fears
and praises violence
when used against the unpopular,
the marginalized or those
with whom it disagrees.

Pity the nation that bathes
daily in the warm waters of grievance and victimhood,
accepting no responsibility for its failings,
all the while claiming a Messianic destiny
ordained by God into a faith rarely lived.

Pity the nation that despises books and ideas,
becomes its own arbiter of truth 
and basks in the comfort of ignorance,
that would rather be told what to believe
and look no further.

Pity the nation where the mantle of freedom
is bestowed by those in power
leaving them free to dispense it just
to those they favor.

Pity the nation that calls its own citizens enemies.

Pity the nation…
Pity the nation.


Kent Reichert passes the time spoiling his dogs, practicing digital photography and writing. His poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies.

DANGEROUS STORIES IN THE AMERICAN PSYCHE

by Marilyn Letts

When I was a child                 in the 1970s

            I lived in Calgary

            I heard Jesus died for me at Calvary

I spoke as a child                     “Are they the same?”

            People laughed, showed me a globe

            Israel on the other side 

I felt as a child               when in the Bible, God said

            Don’t touch my chosen people!

            He meant me and Israel

I thought as a child                 Israel

            in the book of Exodus & the Calgary Herald

            fought their enemies, yet again

When I became a woman  the texts (and the news)

            read genocide  

I put away childish things   and grieve

Note: Italicized phrases in the poem reference 1 Corinthians 13:11, 1 Chronicles 16:22.

Marilyn Letts is a poet and writer who loves to experiment. Her poetry publications include FreeFall Magazine, Feathertale Review, and Other Voices. She lives on the traditional territories of the peoples of the Treaty 7 region and the Métis Nation of Alberta, Districts 5 & 6.

PRAY

by Jean Varda

This video contains black and white footage after the liberation of Buchenwald.

I light a candle for peace and everywhere I go I pray

in my room on my bed on the street in my car,

when I breathe each inhalation is an image of hope

that the bombs will stop falling, the tanks will turn around no nukes will rain down, and those who are fleeing will reach safety and not die on their way.

How can one bear the thought of the little girl in blood

stained pajamas her mother running with her for help

then dying when she reached the hospital.

Even before I was born my mother protested war,

after the horrors of serving as a nurse in WWII

“How could they have kept from us Buchenwald,

Auschwitz, Treblinka?” She would repeat as she showed

me black and white footage of the camps and told me

how lucky I was to be born where I was with my Jewish

blood. She took me on my first peace march to protest

Vietnam, we stayed up all night on an old school bus,

I had never seen so many people at one time

as we marched on Washington.

My father taught me the Russians weren’t our enemies

that they wanted peace just like we did.

It didn’t match what I learned in school. He went to Cuba and Nicaragua, he loved the countries and the people. He was accused of being a Communist before I was born. I took my daughters to protests when they were small and showed them what I believed in, 

still we pray for peace.

          

Jean Varda's poetry has appeared in: The California Quarterly, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, Speckled Trout, The New Verse News, and The Boston Literary Magazine. She has led poetry writing workshops and Open Mics around the country. She presently resides in Chico, California where she is working on an anthology of her poetry.

I AM DRAWING A MAP

by Howard Winn

the little boy said

as he hunched over

his crumpled bit of

paper with the stub

of pencil clutched in

one dirty little hand

of the street he added

so I will know where

all my friends and

enemies live and then

I will know where

it is safe to go and 

where not to go

for there are good guys

and bad ones my mother

says mothers know

she says and my father

agrees and i wonder

how they learned to

tell the good from the bad

A new collection of Howard Winn's poetry has just been published. It is titled Comedy and other observations. Howard Winn continues as Professor of English SUNY.

THE CHILDREN OF SYRIA

by Philip C. Kolin

CREDIT: Laurence Geai‏ @laurencegeai, July 14, 2017.  “#Mossul some of my pictures of our report with @OliveFlore for @ParisMatch . Some civilians are still locked inside, and fighting is not over."

There's no place for angels to sing anymore.
The children of Syria have gone away.
Some died of gas that looked like tulips exploding.
There's no place for angels to sing anymore.
Others received bullets for their birthdays
And so many burned in the fires of their enemies' eyes.
There's no place for angels to sing anymore.
The children of Syria have gone away.

Philip C. Kolin is the University Distinguished Professor at the University of Southern Mississippi where he also edits the Southern Quarterly. He has published more than 40 books on Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, African American playwrights as well as  seven collections of poems. His most recent book  is Emmett Till in Different States: Poems from Third World Press.

A PANTOUM MORASS OF SOCIAL MORES

by Joe Amaral 

“He’s winning this. His critics are losing. We’re better for it.” —Tim Kawakami, The (San Jose) Mercury News, September 7, 2016. KHARTOON! by Khalid.

                                                for Colin Kaepernick


They sack their own hypocritical souls,
judging a biracial man sitting down between
Gatorade coolers, bench warmer, while
standing in safe zones chanting anthems.

Character assassinating a person-
hostile when their comfortable tedium
is knelt upon during an incomplete poem,
overheated, entwined in symbolic confliction.

Dislodged from routine surroundings, habits
of public conformity become glare and troll;
despite loafing when the flag waves on private
TV: bloviating from couches about abstract duty.

In my Catholic days I swung suffocating incense
before hearing the priest who married my parents
molested little boys. We spurned the cross in peace.
Pleas from true patriots are treated with violence.

Some only meme, righteous as sacramental fire
while buying foreign cars, clothes and smartphones
made by slave labor, then pout: THANKS OBAMA!
Colin audibles brave; to Hail Mary the fallow loam

of this country, as American as freedom can be, calling
to the knee-jerks and neutrals, even to the haters,
for a healing conversation amongst culpable toxicity—
warming a bench for enemies to connect, sit,
and see.

Joe Amaral likes to spelunk around the California central coast as a paramedic and stay-at-home dad. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in 3Elements Review, Arcadia Magazine, Crow Hollow 19, Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora, Zingara Poet and other awesome places. Joe won the 2014 Ingrid Reti Literary Award. He also hiked Mount Kilimanjaro. It was epic.

TRUMP IN TRIUMPH

by Ned Balbo

Piñata by Dalton Javier Ramirez, Piñateria Ramirez.

"He knew human folly like the back of his hand . . . "

—Auden

He said the things we didn’t know we felt—
hard truths that showed us what we really feared,
and whom. We listened as he lifted guilt
from our collective conscience. What we heard
reached to the core, though each of us heard something
different that convinced us he was right.
We heard, beyond our borders, rumbling;
within our borders, reason taking flight—
It felt like freedom. In our neighbors’ eyes
we saw a common light, or signs of doubt
that marked the enemies he’d brutalize,
the former friends we’d learn to live without…
His jokes amused us, booming from the stage—
We dreaded—and looked forward to—his rage.

Author’s note: “The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies” (Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal, 1987).

Ned Balbo's The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems received the Poets' Prize and the Donald Justice Prize. His previous books are Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Prize; ForeWord Book of the Year gold medal), and Galileo's Banquet (Towson University Prize). A new book, Upcycling Paumanok, is due out soon from Measure Press. He currently teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and environment at Iowa State University.

INSTRUCTING INGENIOUS INDIGENES

by Sultana Raza

‘Noble Juveniles’ 2014 Sultana Raza Mixed Media

Cocooned in comfortable zones
will the well-heeled ‘educate’

starving millions
forced to beg for work,

borrow permanently,
steal sympathy in grim daylight?

Billions of babies aching to learn
the basics of how to melt glaciers,

cause virgin forests to shrink,
help economy spurt/stutter

after earning enough to consume
as mindlessly as those ensconced

in miles of matching carpet
wall-paper, curtains, trivialbilia,

with too many bulbs,
burning too brightly too late at night.

They’d have a better shot
of being treated nobly

royally, exaltingly
if somehow they got out word

of how they suffered
at the hands of an enemy

that necessitates
the creation, maintenance, and sustenance

of the ‘defense’ industry.
Defending the rights of kids

to stale mouthfuls, rags,
a semblance of childhood

under the highest roof in the world
would be so much more justified

highlighted, applauded,
if only they’d dramatically denounce

popular enemies
of nations who actually possess

rational weapons of mass destruction
who ‘helped’ create

said empty-headed adversaries
in the first place.


Of Indian origin, Sultana Raza has an MA in English Literature. Her short stories and poems have been published in Ancient Heart Magazine (Australia), India Currents (USA), Szirine (USA), Kindred Spirit (UK), Cygnus Review (UK), Arabesque Review, London Grip (UK), Literary Gazette (USA), All Things Girls (UK), and Caduceus (Ed. Yale University, USA), Beyond Bree, (an American MENSA newsletter), the Peter Roe Series, (Tolkien Society UK), The Whirlwind Review (USA), Writer’s Asylum (India), and Silver Leaves Journal #5 (Canada). An awarded artist, Sultana Raza has taken part in numerous group exhibitions in the USA and Europe. She has also participated in international art shows, such as the Nightshow at Riccione, Italy, B.AGL Postbanhof during the Berlin Art Week, the Biennale of Chianciano, Italy in 2013; and ArtExpo New York (alongside Andy Warhol), and Art Monaco in 2014.

TAKING THE MOUND

by Mick Murphy

​

Thomas Eakins

Baseball Players Practicing, 1875

Watercolor on paper

Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design

​                For Robbie

​

​You tidy up,

​as in a boys room,

​moving the earth around.

​Dirt and small bits of stone

​the rakes passed over.

​Sins of omission if

​left untended can cost you

​the game.

​Your pitcher’s crease

​is lamb white, your heart

​the same.

​Yet unmarked by the spikes

​of the enemy.

​Your arms are supple and

​ready under home

​cotton whites.

​Your glove new leather

​oiled and shaped the night before.

​You love our summer game.

​

​But they come, the people from

​the world, and you have to pitch to them.

Mick Murphy is astudent of Amy Holman at the Hudson Valley Writers center in Sleepy Hollow New York. A former business executive, he has studied and written poems for many years. His work looks at personal and spiritual issues and the intersection of these with the life of his generation. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York. He also writes about sports.