SONNET: AMERICA IN 2019

by Robert Darling

Donald Trump — Riding the Wrecking Ball, by DonkeyHotey

A would-be tyrant and accomplished liar

as president, the courts deaf to the poor,

and Congress filled with dotards up for hire;

the churches silent on what they should deplore

with priests and pastors who serve their own desire,

and conscience quiet in communities at war

with common sense.  As once the drivers of slaves

claimed they were slaves themselves, is hypocrisy

the driver of our facts? We build on graves

of genocide and treat our history

as promised consummation, the end of days,

and claim our innocence has kept us free.

And if bare, battered Truth somehow appeared

would we have eyes to see or ears to hear? 

Robert Darling has published two full-length collections of poetry, So Far and Gleanings, three chapbooks of poems, Boundaries, The Craftsman’s Praise, and Breaking the Silence and a volume of criticism on the Australian poet A.D. Hope. He has contributed poems and reviews to over fifty magazines and articles in several reference books in the US, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia.  He is Professor in Humanities and Fine Arts at Keuka College. The above poem is a response/updating of Shelley's "Sonnet: England in 1819."

THE FABULISTS

by Devon Balwit

Alex Jones, whose InfoWars website is viewed by millions, says that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was an elaborate hoax invented by government-backed “gun grabbers.”Credit: Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times. “In three separate lawsuits—the most recent was filed on Wednesday in Superior Court in Bridgeport, Conn.—the families of eight Sandy Hook victims as well as an F.B.I. agent who responded to the shooting seek damages for defamation. The families allege in one suit, filed by Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder in Bridgeport, that Mr. Jones and his colleagues ‘persistently perpetuated a monstrous, unspeakable lie: that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged, and that the families who lost loved ones that day are actors who faked their relatives’ deaths.’” —The New York Times, May 23, 2018

In a post-truth world, your loved ones never died,
all 26 of them spirited back into bodies,
you, nothing more than performers of grief, hacks
for hire by unseen puppeteers. That pietà
where you held your six-year-old, confirming
his fatal wound, never happened, you expert
in manufacturing mourning. Your child’s brother
wonders how he can be told to doubt his memories,
wonders why anyone would suggest such an erasure.
Why would the President promise, I will never let
you down—but to the wrong ones, the deniers?
Fathers struggle to explain this to surviving children.
Mothers march grimly into the court house.
Twenty-six truths stand in stubborn admonishment.



Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from the Pacific Northwest. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.