Poem: Rogue Ants

 

Rogue Ants

 

the rogue ants cry daily

over the excavated ribs of this aching planet,

 yet no flowers come.

 

they scream in packed streets amid obvious evil,

 but no antenna turns a head.

 

they watch smiles freeze-dried smiles 

swallow their pleas into cold throats

as stainless as upscale refrigerators.

 

they rage against the blood money of empire,

whiel the streets ignore, ignore, ignore,

 or laugh and hurl scorn

 

or ignore, ignore, ignore …

the rogues call them smug pharisees,

posh swine who soil pearls,

or lemmings extraordinare.

 

but it steers not the marching scuttle,

does nothing to impede the hive,

the rapine.  the extort.  the war.

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2/2/24 mods

7/6 ... lots of changes for POV clarity and concision

Poem: Contagious

 

 Contagious

somewhere in a graveyard of sand crawling over itself

a bust on a coin tilts unconscionable,

its single sunken eye an iris-drowned. 

 

armies once slashed each other into dead soldiers

for the king on its countenance.

 

blood speckled its tarnished surface,

a fierce luster, contagious, beacon of war.

 

the greater the slaughter

the more valuable the weight,

a heft inciting blades to pillage and froth,

 

until one of those soldiers,

or some bereaved queen or lover,

stumbled through the mounds of corpses in anguish

and tossed the coin down.

 

now it claims to remember nothing,

and waits for no one or anything,

vast in its apathy of victory erased,

somewhere in  a shell game 

of borderless dunes.

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Poem: Driven

 

Driven

a gaff(e?) of roses,

crows that scissor in flight,

or the sharp flail of a butterfly,

my fingers bleed prose

while i suffer such wounds of sparse sentence.

 

i crave to feel as wonderful

as an entomologist hawking a beetle;

for my words to strive and swarm

into the verbal equivalent of original insects.

 

if only someday i unearthed a new molecule,

something unheard of, even though infinitesimal, still,

aromatic to the nostril of literature,

 

maybe then i could die complete.

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5/28 "unearth" replaces "unearthed"

5/22 removed a word

5/21 ... some mods ... fixed spelling

"God has an inordinate fondness for beetles"

Original title  "Mad Poet" 

A Horrifying Time in the USA

 

 A horrifying time in the USA as fascism infects and spreads.  Republican-controlled states pass abortion = murder laws.  Florida leads the evil way, scaring its teachers by banning anything about ‘gay’ in the classrooms, including a Disney movie with a gay character:

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1176334055/florida-investigating-teacher-disney-movie-gay-character-desantis

Governor DeSantis has banned various kinds of oppression studies in Florida’s secondary schools, and also is seeking more restrictions on state colleges and universities.  Such laws and bans encourage misogynous, homophobic, racist hate and deny the sexism, homophobia and racism that are inveterate in the historic and contemporaneous United States.

It goes without saying that the fascist movement is led by patriarchal heteronormative White men.  The GOP (Republicans) in state and federal legislatures comprise a sea of White male faces sprinkled with a few other sorts of folk.  Even so, the five female senators in the South Carolina legislature, crossing political lines and banding together, were able to prevent the passage of a near total abortion ban in that state:

https://abcnews4.com/newsletter-daily/five-south-carolina-female-state-senators-stop-near-abortion-ban-reflect-on-experience-house-senate-assembly-legislature-legislators-lawmakers-katrina-shealy-sandy-senn-mia-mcleod-wciv

 

The surge of hate is everywhere.  Hate crimes and attacks, even on political offices, have occurred in a cluster recently:

 

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/15/politics/gerry-connolly-staffer-attacked/index.html

 

The angry temperature of the country keeps rising.  Mass shootings are an almost daily part of American culture, on track to be worse than last year.  Republican leaders refuse to outlaw private citizens from buying military grade semi-automatic rifles.  Some of these leaders even wear “AR-15” pins on their lapels, and send out Christmas cards with their children brandishing guns.

It is not inevitable that fascism will take over America.  The fascists lost big in the last two elections, even though they launched a big attack on the election system itself, epitomized by the Big Lie of their chauvinistic leader Donald Trump.  Most Americans do not want draconian anti-abortion laws.  They want stronger gun regulation.  They accept LBGTQ people as equals (as evident from trends in the entertainment industry) and want equality for woman and all races/ethnicities.

Perhaps the fascist infection will peak this year and fade out after they lose in the 2024 election cycle.  But only if the majority of the American people do not acquiesce.  We need, first of all, to admit that this is a fascist movement.  Stop calling Republicans “conservatives.”  Secondly, admit that the fascists will not play by any ethical rules.  Cruelty, force and bullying are at the heart of the might-makes-right cult mentality.  The essence of fascism is to unite enough citizens in a cult of hate under a charismatic leader to threaten, cower and gaslight everyone outside the cult.  

Remember, too, that a cult will wear a mask of kindness and decency as a strategy to gain and maintain power.  Remember Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” in describing the Nazis.  All cults try to recruit by seeming friendly and kind, when it is optimal for their purposes.  Then they will turn around and menace with hate and violence.  

Indeed, this is similar to what goes on in a domestic violence household:

 https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2020/01/political-abuse.html

The cult of fascism is here.  It is attempting to grow and spread.  What will you do?  Be pleasant to fascists, call them conservatives, and hide from the truth?  Will you succumb to denialism?  Or play Switzerland, hoping to evade any personal trouble by keeping neutral?

Elie Wiesel, author of Night:

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.

 

==========================

Good op-ed by Jennifer Rubin, showing how ignorance is a right-wing tool:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/18/desantis-authoritarian-ignorant/

Gotta rush off to a protest.  I'll edit this later today (5/17) (done)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Black Spider Beach

 

Black Spider Beach

 

no sand, only pebbles,

unreckonable dice rolls of hungry waves;

 

and seaweed pungent along the wrack line,

mussed and disheveled:

jagged miles of flattened sea monsters,

orgies in shucked, shaggy throes.

 

so so much, much too much wind

 

it licks basalt niches

and flutes through old weirs.

it tickles purple stalks of Jonah crabs

shriveling their plump, unctuous eyes.

 

“Boot Cove Bay”

 

always an old shoe here,

and if it vanishes

another takes residence overnight.

a better name would be “Black Spider Beach”

 

for the stubbly spiders, broad as thumbnails,

which percolate up through the stones.

 

in October

every footfall radiates arachnid,

and if you approach the lone shoe,

scuttles ripple around your steps.

 

just an ordinary sneaker, the $-mart kind,

brine-dyed and beach-bitten;

but the spiders seem afraid, somehow,

as if the Ace of Spiders waits below.

 

twin Clorox bottles

nod from the intertidal zone,

white plastic foreheads

of a couple who tried.

 

====================================

2/2/24 ... mods

5/25 ... more word changes... can't get this to cohere

5/21 ... lots of mods, though cosmetic

5/14 ... mods later in the day

https://www.mcht.org/preserve/boot-head/

Ethics Review: Till (2022)

 

Ethics Review:  Till (2022)

Welcome to the Ethics Review.  The focus is on the cultural messages sent by the movie or show, not the overall quality.

Till (2022)

 

Till is a succinctly apt title for a movie that honors both Emmett and his mother Mamie.  The extremely violent, hate-fueled, racist murder of 14-year old Emmett Till takes place in an early scene, and although he remains a rich presence, the main focus is on Mamie. 

There is no downside to Till.  In contrast, when I reviewed Marshall, eponymous with Thurgood Marshall, there was a serious flaw: not only the inclusion, but the cinematic pedestaling of a rape myth:  that women who don’t scream aren’t really raped.

https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2021/10/ethical-review-sketches-of-five-netflix.html

The importance of challenging this myth came up recently in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit against Donald Trump.  When cross-examined, Carroll said, “I'm telling you he raped me, whether I screamed or not.”

Till includes no oppressive stereotypes, not that I saw.  It furthermore empowers both Black women and men, with sensitive supporting roles for the males who help Mamie face the trauma of losing her son.  Many characters, male and female, bolster Mamie, while facing their own insecurities and wounds.  Due to astute script-writing, these self-confrontations implicitly examine how White dominance coerces the human soul.

Despite the revelatory and validating voices around her, Mamie leads the way .  In fact, her poignant and challenging remarks are often the reason people dare to face their own demons and end up supporting her.   Unprompted, Mamie makes the excruciating choice to display her son’s body in an open casket, putting his hideous wounds on display for the public.  Justice is her brave goal, justice that takes on a vicious, gaslighting White Southern establishment, and the inveterate institution of racism itself.

As befits a tribute to a crucial historical event, the acting is superb.  Danielle Deadwyler, who plays Mamie, absorbed me with her grief, her anger, her resolve, and every other nuance of emotion and passion one might expect from a mother whose son is murdered in vast hate, and who finds herself thrust into the national spotlight. 

If the acting had been bad, it would've been, in my mind, an ethical failure, a kind of mockery, though unintentional.  But real care was taken to make this movie worthy of its topic.

The disfigurement and death of Emmett exemplifies the presence of a great evil in our society:  a virulent racism that slouches onward still, far after the Civil War to end slavery.   This racism festered in segregated 1955, when the movie is set, and still does to this day. 

And yet Till also shines a light of hope on our future as a nation.  If Mamie can do what she did, and if we Americans can welcome into our hearts and minds a movie about her and Emmett, a movie this evocative, this compelling, this ethically beautiful, maybe we can overcome someday.  I will dare to say it:  some progress, but not nearly enough, not near the mountaintop yet, has been made.

===========================================================

 

 

 

 

 

 

Semester ended, grading done, I've been wanting to do some ethical reviews for some time.

Poem: Psychopomp

 

Psychopomp

 

caresses of spectra

nestle the last molecule of a life,

 

and tend it within prisms,

as if turning an egg.

 

eyelids, desolate as moon dust,

open and are no longer dry.

 

craters that pocked worn out lungs

swell with luminous vapor.

 

this lost life,

 

it once yearned to soar,

and yet it is death that grants wings,

 

death gorgeous as a rainbow

to bridge beyond Cygnus.

 

the Earth itself

 

soon an indolent pebble,

distant in the twinkling.

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2/2/24 .... mods

5/9 ... removed "unreckonable" before "twinkling"

 

Poem: Blurred

 

Blurred

night falls till there is no dark.  each star fluid as a young child's stare into a glitter-spark waterfall of sundrops swept by cascades of leaves; a crossroads where songbirds perch in the kiss of Hesperus and Phosphorus; where moths and bees foam in fusions of noon and witching hour.  here Phoenix pirouettes with Nightingale; and earth-bent roots curl through wisps of meteor and struts of comet. 

 Here.  This Joy.  This Beginning.  This End.

==================================

2/19/24 ... super difficult poem, should never have wrote it

2/2/24 ... mods

10/1 ....  took out a word

8/18 ... took out a word

5/21 shortened second phrase

5/6 "to" replaces "in"

5/3 significant mods a couple hours after posting