THE AGE OF MAGA HATS AND A DIMWIT VIRUS

by Lyndi Waters                

 

More Than a Feeling by Matt Lubchansky, The Nib, April 22, 2020

Our generation passes
with both hands over our eyes,
yet moving a certain bluster
through the world as owners,

out the other side
as whimpering eye blinks,
departing roughly the same time
realization dawns

of how the world has carved us,
tumbled us in the rapids
until our edges are smooth.
The preachers wave their cleavers,

hack us apart like fresh fish at market,
politicians widen the space
between the halves
then stuff them with our own fears.

How long will we acquiesce
to rock hunters who pass truth by
in search of people to fit their stories,
characters who have already

been ear-tagged through fable,
pressed into service,
handed scripts and dark glasses.
And yet we continue on with a dimwit virus,

MAGA hats, sippy cups of bleach,
protesters demanding haircuts,
and quiet poets, who navel gaze and describe sunsets
while Denise Levertov rolls in her grave.

Lyndi Waters is a Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the 2019 Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award, the 2018 Eugene V. Shea National Poetry Contest, and the 2019 Wyoming Writers, Inc. free verse contest. Lyndi’s poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in literary magazines and anthologies such as The Owen Wister Review, Gyroscope Review, New Verse News, Picaroon Poetry, Unbroken Journal, Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers (Sastrugi Press, 2016), and Troubadour (Picaroon Poetry Press, U.K., 2017).

TO THE NEW REBELS

by Margery Parsons

Inspired by the young demonstrators in Madison, protesting the police killing of Tony Robinson.

Spartacus on a hill
dreaming up at a tapestry of stars
as slaves from a far flung empire
prepared to fight Rome.
What made the ragged minions
with nothing to call their own
except misery
dare to challenge Caesar's throne,
its fearsome weaponry,
legendary battles won,
and all the philosophical sophistry
used to justify its reign?
What gave them the temerity
to defy gods, to tear down
idols, to question
the exalted certainty of the known?
Look into the eyes
of a mother who has lost her son
to a centurion,
a father carrying the remains
of a child slain by drones.
Listen to the cries
of a generation doomed to oblivion
and you will know why you must rise
as they have done.


Margery Parsons is an activist and poet; she lives in Chicago, works for an arts organization, loves movies and music.