FINDING HOPE

by Ron Shapiro

Festive.

Never in my life have I been to a march where everyone is smiling, singing along to the music, waving flags illuminating the space between elbow-to-elbow people of all ages.

Look to my left, women dancing. Look to my right, people hugging.

 

Is this the country I hear about on the news? Divided? Tribal?

 

None of that here. No way. No how.

 

Three mega-screens with the word Freedom surrounded with three stars on each side.

 

Above, wispy clouds and warm sun grace the day eventually evolving into a spectacular sunset of pink and orange clouds.

 

But right now, it’s a party! A celebration!

 

Good to be around so many like-minded folks. The vibe invites me to hope. 

Is that so bad?

You can’t tell me it is. No talking heads here. Just ordinary citizens being what this country could be.

 

Idealism bubbles up from the pessimism, cynicism, half empty, brokenness, anger, hatred and anything else in the raw sewage of lies and fascism.

 

Sitting now on the grass, I can only feel the deep bass shaking the earth and observe moving feet, bouncing bodies grooving with the music. I can’t help but smile. O’Jays “Love Train” rolling down the tracks of hope and love.

 

And if I look over my right shoulder, I can imagine the Washington Monument swaying a little.

 

The most alive I’ve felt during this election season. No news here; just joy of life, of being here now. Unplugged but plugged into the moment. Nowhere else I’d want to be.

 

This  place feels like a shelter from the political storm. Nothing to turn off or turn down here.

 

Just acceptance of how the country’s future could be if sanity, truth and love prevails. Nothing perfect but a baby step in the direction of King's "moral arc" of justice.

 

And should Harris win and repubs undermine some of her policy ideas, at least she will have elevated the English language.

 

Her speeches regularly use words such as hope, idealism, promise, opportunity, joy, rights, freedom, helping, raising, community, love, heroes, happiness, citizenship, compromise, love, new, forward, caring, trust, others, light and truth.

 

As someone who loves words, hearing and, yes, feeling those words at the rally yesterday emerged as one of the highlights for me. Being with 50,000 or so people immersed together in such positive language was deeply inspirational.

 

I think even Orwell would have savored the spirit of this uplifting moment.

 

And perhaps I sipped a bit too much of the celebratory kool-aid at the event.

 

But let me say that it was a delightfully sweet and tasty brew.

Ron Shapiro, an award-winning teacher, currently mentors college essay writing as well as teaches Memoir Writing through George Mason University. He has published writings in Nova Bards 23 & 24, Gatherings, Poets of the Promise, Poetry X Hunger, Minute Musings, Backchannels, Gezer Kibbutz Gallery, All Your Poems, Paper Cranes Literary Magazine and twochapbooks: Sacred Spaces and Wonderings. He lives with his wife and Shanti the Cat in Reston, Virginia.

OVERTLY POLITICAL

by David Dumouriez

in response to the announcement of the UK general election.

Link here to Xwitter.

Election sickness
is on us once more,
with a worse set of symptoms
than ever before.

There’s the hoard of campaigners
who will burst through the gate
intending to give us
the bullshit we hate;

there are more of them still
who will tramp till they bleed
to deliver those leaflets
we don’t want to read.

There’s our constituency member
whose job-losing fears
make him visit these parts
for the first time in years.

There are those who oppose him,
who want what he’s had;
they claim to be better

but they’ll be just as bad.

There are three party leaders
who each boast they’ll win
(though two of them know

that they’ll never get in).

There’s the phony sincerity,
the well-rehearsed lies;
there’s the promise of everything

under the skies.

There’s debating and speeches,
many words are received;
but it’s air and not action,

so there’s nothing achieved.

There are infantile adverts
meant to mask what’s unsound
about the party elites

and the guff they propound.

There’s the media coverage
where, with serious breath,
overpaid people
try to talk us to death.

There’s the collection of ‘experts’
from colleges wide,
who make duff predictions
then run off and hide.

There’s the feeling in voters,
drawn from years in the past,
that the parties betray them
when the votes have been cast.

So discuss all the options—
that won’t tax your jaws—
half think about stirring,
and then stay indoors.

David Dumouriez wouldn't be tempted to blow his own trumpet even if a) he had a trumpet or b) he knew how to play one.

POST-ELECTION STRESS DISORDER

by Howie Good

 

Thousands of President Trump’s supporters converged on Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14 to falsely claim he won the election. (Video: Jorge Ribas, Joyce Koh/Photo: Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)

The emperor’s model army marches on,

bringing with them the suffocating smell of smoke,

a darkness like mud, while tens of millions

of just plain folks artlessly demonstrate their devotion

by cheering threats of kidnapping and murder

and parading bright new flags that with each wave

in the lie-filled air grow duller and more tattered,  

and when the light dwindles to a final few hours,

there will be tweet storms and wild speeches

and the military music of boots stamping on faces.

Howie Good is the author of The Death Row Shuffle, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

A PRAYER NOT SPOKEN

by Jill Crainshaw

Words.

Matter.

In us.

God’s love
made skin and bones
muscle and marrow
hands and hearts
God’s words.
Matter.
In us.

No more speeches or spin doctors,
debates or diatribes—no--
God’s nouns and adjectives and verbs
made alive
welcoming
respecting
forgiving
loving
incarnating belonging
in us.

Words made matter,
planted in salvaged soil
reclaimed
restored
valued
savored and saving
hope
in us.

So be it.

Author’s note: So many words. Too many. This is what came to mind for me as I listened to all the talk at and about the National Prayer Breakfast. As a Christian clergy person, I longed at the end of a week of chaotic and contentious words in Washington for prayerful moments of reflection, even for expressions of concern for all that divides us as a nation. John’s Gospel speaks of Jesus as God’s Word made flesh. This week, I longed for fewer spoken words and more words made flesh in embodied actions of communal care that cross boundaries and borders that separate us from each other. I realize that such longings are idealistic. They dwell in sacred geographies of hope. For now, these longings are, for me, the prayer that was not spoken at this week’s prayer breakfast. 

Jill Crainshaw is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and a liturgical theology professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

FOR WALT AND ALLEN

by Rick Gray

                                                                 

My name is announced before takeoff.
It’s JFK again, but this is a new terminal.
I haul my carry-on past rich kids pouting
In First-Class, already juiced,
 and step back onto the homeland.

Outside waits a man in a blue uniform and a silver badge.
“Are you a writer?” he asks.  There are tribal scars
On his fat cheeks.  I don’t ask.
“Follow me,” he tells me, and we walk together back
Down the tube to America. Our footsteps echo out of rhythm.

At the American Airlines check-out desk ten men are hovering over
my lost notebook of poems. I relapsed in the wine bar and my God punishes.
A man no older than thirty introduces himself as Tim from the Terrorism Task Force.
I told him I was not impressed, and that I believe in respect for elders.
I’m very traditional that way, Tim. Maybe it was my years in Africa when I lived in a hut.
Tim’s training did not include humor and, confused, he steps away.                                                          

The Boss moves in, a man with the pink alcoholic shade my ancestors taught me.
His face looks frozen in 1974. Very pre 9/11, with a suit that looks
lifted from the costume room of The French Connection.
“You’re a poet?” he starts. “You said it,” I swing back at him, “not me.”
“ A woman found your notebook and was very alarmed,” he frowns.
I try to break his Popeye scowl with a grin. He goes grim.

“Your poem called Bomb Threat is of concern,” he continues,
Lifting a torn page out of my notebook. Everything is written in green.
“And your comments about Homeland Security we all find curious.”
“That shit is weird,” the black guy with the scars exclaims. Everyone nods before
French Connection waves them still.

“I’m missing my plane,” I say, and a cop tells me to forget about flight.
“What was your destination?” another one asks.
I am going to Afghanistan to teach Shakespeare, I calmly explain.
I finally get my first laugh. But when I tell them to go fuck themselves, fascist pigs,
They’re back to business with my notebooks.     

But not I.
No, I now have a growing audience of passengers for the Paris flight
And I was raised not to waste. Children are starving in Africa.
THIS IS NOT AMERICA! I shout to them.                                                                                  
I AM BEING HELD FOR POETRY! I cry, and don’t know why I raise my fist.
This must be the oral thrill of the spoken word I’ve read about    
And I can feel Whitman and Ginsberg grinning below the New York dirt of JFK.
“Front page!” I bluff to the boss, flushed with my little fame, “New York Times!”
and pull out another notebook and start writing, staring into his badge.

Walkie-talkies come out and soon an alternative ticket is being printed.
They give an Irish cop the job of returning my notebooks; no one else will touch them.
“Hold onto these,” he gives me a wink I might, in a better mood, call Whitmanesque.
“It’s a shitty job,“ he apologizes as I take back my poems and head to another gate.
“Any good publications?” I hear him call out to me.
“Nope,” I shout back, “my job sucks too.”

Oh America, I don’t want to leave you!
I want to stay and write poems that make men huddle in airports!
I want to be pulled off your American Airlines and asked by scarred men if I’m a writer!
I want to make speeches about liberty to passengers to Paris!
I want to alarm everyone in the country!
But instead I’m off to another stupid war
To pay for my daughter’s ballet.
No one in America responds to my resume,
only these lost notebooks that don’t pay.
So before I step away from my homeland
I get one last jab at the Irish cop trailing me.
“I’m coming back soon!” I shout back at him from the tube.
“And we’ll be waiting!” he calls back to me, waving a little blue book.


Rick Gray served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and currently teaches at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. He was a finalist for the Editor's Award at Margie, and has an essay that will be appearing in the forthcoming book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock. When not in Kabul, he lives with his wife Ghizlane and twin daughters Rania and Maria in Florida.