MYTHINFORMATION

by Philip Stern

written in serious wordplay

Now the emergingcy

is over,

caution and funding

are over.

 

Yesterday, one of our leaders went mything.

He said it was a hoax.

Then said

it would not blast.

 

Then sold equine and oquine

and proposed bleach

to the fringe bleacher seats

at his attent show.

 

He watched as

the wildfirus burned

ungoverned,

saw it sprinkle hot ashes

 

on refrigerated

covid wagons

circling hospitals

where breathless bodies stiffened.

 

Yet mythed messages still burn,

about dangers of masking

and vaccines that damnage DNA,

still cause national dysfusion.

 

So do we now just forget

that we gallowed

over one million deaths

to happen?

 

Philip Stern is 95, had a poem published in The Atlantic in 1957, wrote pop songs in the 60s, and started writing poetry again after retiring from college teaching.

ON BARS

by DeWitt Henry

Source: Cagle

A.G. Bill Barr
should be disbarred
and/or spend time
behind bars or
drinking at them,
both earnest and glib.
doing biddings of
our worst President,
bar none.

For lack of Barack,
step up, be heard;
raise the bar of expectations.
Climb the barricades.
High jump, pole-jump:
clear the bar.
Cross the bar.

Nearly half of us
fear barbarian hordes,
beards and all (unless
us is them).  Seek to
bar the gate, build barriers.
Keep us over barrels, where
barrels are meant for
storing and protecting,
e.g. over Niagara;
or for shooting fish,
or empty ones for noise.

The BAR man sights down
his ungainly weapon
(though Browning Automatic Rifle
has nothing to do with “baros,”
Greek for weight).

Bars of gold, candy, or soap.
Bars of music and rank.
Barcode.  Bar-
gain.  Crow, salad,
barbell and barometer.
Stars and bars forever.

Barbed.  Barred.

Democracy amok.

DeWitt Henry’s most recent prose collection is Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays (MadHat, 2018).  A new collection, Endings and Beginnings: Family Essays, is scheduled for 2020 from MadHat.  Poems have appeared in Ibbetson Street, On the Seawall, Plume, Muddy River Poetry Review, Constellations, and Woven Tale Press.  Henry was the founding editor of Ploughshares and is Prof. Emeritus at Emerson College.