Category Archives: Politics

Challenging Fortune

Click on first photo to enlarge all and read captions.

Challenging Fortune

Just when we’re feeling cocky—superior and svelte,
fate dishes out an uppercut, or one below the belt.
Its fickleness is onerous. Its lessons often hard.
Some end up with a loving cup and others with a shard.

So if misfortune catches you and holds you in its grasp,
for sure, good fortune harbors another in its clasp.
Rejoicing in their happiness may bring your pain’s surcease,
and looking at a larger view may bring you some release.

Some men are accustomed to eating all the pie.
They see no good in sharing. They vie and vie and vie
to horde the opportunities. It’s their sign of success.
They profit on our labors, grow rich on our duress.

It brings a sort of balance, this giving and this taking.
It teaches us that fortune is not just of our making.
There may not be enough good luck to insist that they share.
Label him 
a “socialist”If anyone should dare.

Where is the one who’ll stop them? Who will come to show the way?
What warrior or what holy man will  lead us in the fray?
Those who’ve usurped religion seem to have lost the point.
They don’t champion the underdog.  It’s rich men they anoint.

Everything is power and perhaps it always was.
For eons we’ve forgotten this, probably because
the photos of these  greedy men reaching for the stars,
cruising in their massive yachts and their racing cars,

look so pretty on the page. The minute that we see them,
instead of censuring the greed, we simply want to be them.
They stage their wars and make their gains and young men die to aid it.
And instead of ruing war, we honor those who made it.

The prompt words today were shard, onerous, opportunity and uppercut.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/01/17/rdp-thursday-shard/
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/01/17/fowc-with-fandango-onerous/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/01/17/your-daily-word-prompt-opportunity-january-17-2019/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/01/17/uppercut/

BEAU OF THE FIFTH COLUMN: BORDER WALL

If you think the wall and the current border patrol policies are a humane answer to immigration, I dare you to watch this through to the end.

Dear Donald

 

Dear Donald

Serving your own needs or colluding with the Russians
may bring Comminatory actions or other repercussions,
for though you may be pardoned for malfeasance of your diction,
we find we can’t forgive you for your constant words of fiction.

The way you won your office and your acts of dereliction
toward the country you have wronged may lead to your conviction.
What sentence might such huge acts of questionable reason
carry, let alone the sentence for your acts of treason?

You meet such accusations with rhetoric and a shrug
while cronies in high office choose to sweep them ‘neath the rug.
What do I recommend should they bring charges and convict you?
Alas, that will not happen. It’s your judges who first picked you!

Prompt words today are recommend, carry, comminatory and conviction.  Lots of c’s!!! Here are links to the sites who created those prompts.  Come play along.
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/11/21/rdp-wednesday-recommend/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/11/21/fowc-with-fandango-carry/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2018/11/12/your-daily-word-prompt-comminatory-November-12-2018/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/11/21/conviction/

Not Good Enough, America!!!

Not Good Enough, America!!!

Will they carve his effigy on  a golden coin
and use it for ill purposes, our country to purloin?
Will they pare back Utopia, and in their selfish carving
leave us all in danger? Leave the masses starving?
When there’s no way left to judge them, when justice has been bought,
will we all reach out too late for what we’ll wish we sought
much earlier, when there was a chance we could impeach
the ones who took Utopia farther from our reach?

 

The prompt words are danger, effigy, starve and Utopia.

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/11/07/fowc-with-fandango-danger/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/11/07/effigy/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/daily-addictions-2018-week-44/starve
dverse poets: Utopia

Political Gaming


Political Gaming

Even a gamester must confess
that life is no mere game of chess.
Friday’s vote, Friday’s disaster
that brings on man’s end all the faster.

 

The Ragtag Daily Prompt was Friday.

Fandango’s Prompt was Chess.

 

 

Microcosm

Click on any photo to enlarge all.

Microcosm

Solace from this angst-filled world can best be found at home.
It wraps around me snuggly under my protective dome.
Prioritizing calm and peace, I have a little chat
with a dog or bird or two, or maybe with a cat.

I lie snug in my hammock and survey the too-long grass
of my private little meadow where no evil comes to pass
short of combat between possums and dogs too poorly trained
to entertain these welcome guests in manners more restrained.

Their battles are, alas, short lived. The dogs always the winners.
As in the world, the bounty here goes to the biggest sinners.
The possum’s only infraction? It’s not a dog or cat
and its physical resemblance is too close to a rat.

And so the world injects itself into my little nest,
insisting the familiar is what we accept best.
These battles happen when I’m gone or when I’m fast asleep,
too lost to this too-conscious world, lost in a world more deep.

As things are on the outside, I fear they’re also here.
My world is not a perfect world, but simply a small mirror
to what is happening all around. It is without a doubt
those who have most everything keeping others out!

DSC07100

Stand Up For Verity

Stand Up for Verity

A fabulist can take the truth and spin it, change it, plan it,
but then it is no longer truth, for truth is carved in granite.
The real truth is indelible. Permanent. Etched in stone.
Don’t mess with it and call it truth. You must leave truth alone.
It can’t accommodate a stretch. It’s fierce in resolution.
It’s not right to bend it simply to find a solution.

Truth is truth and fabrication is another matter,
so do not conjure up a tale and claim it’s not the latter.
Though presidents and kings and poets scratching in their dormer
might for their single purposes stray away from the former,
there must be someone willing to call out their acts as ruthless,
for there’s no folly greater than to be led by the truthless.

 

The prompt words today are fabulist, fierce, accommodate and granite. Here are links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/10/20/rdp-saturday-fabulist/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/10/20/fowc-with-fandango-fierce/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/10/13/daily-addictions-2018-week-41/accommodate
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/10/20/granite/

Lava

I saw this wonderful tirade by Audra Alexander on a friend’s Facebook page. I tracked down the author, who generously gave me permission to run it on my blog. Since there was no button on her blog to do so, I couldn’t “reblog” it, so here it is in its entirety. I hope you visit her blog, URL given below, to tell her what you think !!!! I think she’s captured perfectly and in an entertaining if irate fashion what is going to happen when Kavanaugh is confirmed:

Lava

Kavanaugh is going to get confirmed, we all know that. A lot of women will be very angry. Some might even take to the streets. But this won’t be the tipping point. There won’t be a tipping point, there never is. There will just be the subterranean lava flow of women’s anger – slow, blistering, savage and inexorable. We’ll go to bed angry, we’ll get up angry, we’ll drink our coffee and fix the kids’ breakfasts angrily, we’ll drive thru car line and to work angry, our male colleagues will ask each other if we’re on the rag, we’ll eat silent lunches with rage and we’ll pick up groceries on the way home with vengeance on our hearts. We’ll kiss our partners and our kids goodnight wrathfully. We’ll cry hot, silently screaming tears in the middle of brushing our teeth. We’ll go to bed angry. We’ll get up angry…

Nothing will seem to change for you. But the mother of a 32 year old man will suddenly snap at him to “Grow up!” when he complains that he’s pretty sick of frozen dinners lately. That quiet chick 3 cubicles down will show up out of nowhere and tell a gathering of dudebros that she’ll report them to HR if they don’t shut up. They’ll call her a bitch under their breath as she turns around, but she won’t care. The teenage daughter will ask her dad if he’d still find it funny if she was the punchline in his favorite joke. He’ll scold her for talking back and look at his wife, who will look back and say nothing. Another daughter will say nothing to her father – ever again.

The anger will shift, seismic but unseen. Before the lava used to burn us to ash on the inside. It’s bubbling over now. Enough of us have ripped open our bodies to let the boiling soil of our lives out that the heat itself causes fires. Sure, you can put one or two out at a time. A single flame is easy to catch. But the lava is elemental and everywhere. Kavanaugh will be confirmed. And in less than a generation he’ll be a petrified ash fossil, frozen in a rictus of agony in the new Pompeii. Nothing will seem to have changed, until it’s too late. The lava of our anger is going to cover the earth and bury you.

Here is her blog.  Check it out!  https://scarletvirago.com/2018/09/28/lava/

Stemming the Rage

Street Mural on wood viewed in Guanajuato

 

Stemming the Rage

To seed grace and stability in these tempestuous times,
try not to retaliate in your tweets and rhymes.
Simply state the truth as you continue to perceive it.
If you do not stir angst you’re less likely to receive it.
Choose not to participate when small minds rant and bray.
Just find a saner audience you’re likelier to sway.
This isn’t always easy. Ghandi led the way,
and he moved the British at the end of day.

Whether Trump or Kim Jong-un, Hitler or Pol Pot 
could be swayed by passive resistance? Perhaps, or perhaps not.
But surely there are other souls—even ones of note
who might be nudged to change their minds and even change their vote.
If you can curb your anger and respond with facts and sanity,
perhaps you’ll find a route to chip away at their inanity.
Please take with a grain of salt this lesson that I preach.
Actually, I must admit, it’s me I’m trying to teach.

 

Word prompts for today were: grace, stability, tempestuous and retaliate. Here are the links:

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/rdp-monday-grace/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/10/fowc-with-fandango-stability/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/tempestuous/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/daily-addictions-2018-week-36/retaliate

What Took You So Long?