The December issue of Verse-Virtual.com, the online poetry journal, published four of my poems in response an election that I can only describe — using the mildest term I can think of — as disappointing.

Here’s an excerpt from my poem The Gift That Keeps on Giving (or: I’m Going to Yoga):

I shrink my violets, hide in my trees,
wake in the morning like the last man
in a Twilight Zone episode stunned to find he is here all alone
Be careful not to step on your glasses
on the way to reading Sinclair Lewis’s “It can’t happen here”
Or that science fiction story
where the rich game hunter goes back in geological time, steps off the path, and changes history so that in his own day the fascist is elected President.
We don’t live, you have surely noted, in a state of nature
We won’t last a week if a bumbling cyclops
shreds the bonds among us beyond repairing
Walk up and down the street, you’ll find nothing to eat
Little that will burn, dirty rain to drink
And the only ones with ammunition are precisely those
you do not trust not to use it.

My poem “November Twilight” is written from a considerably milder perspective. Here’s an excerpt from that poem:

no one will take a vote on the sky
the pink lip along the thickly treed horizon
the soft pouch of leafage, upturned like gloved hands
to take us down where it is safe, and beautiful
and sky kisses earth goodnight and chants, slowly,
the prayer for forgiveness, the prayer for gentle touches,
the prayer for deeper, dream-filled journeys, the prayer for better selves,
the remembrance of best love, held hands,
love domestic, like secret things told
to a child.

Finally, here are a few stanzas from my poem “So Little To Be Proud Of,” a poem written after the manner of William Blake, who wrote political and moral commentaries on the injustices of his world in the early 1800s in rhymed couplets:

Every fearful infant’s cry
Tells a truth mere fools deny
Changes real the world has seen
Flow swiftly from the guillotine

Changes slow the cost is paid
By childhood thwarted and afraid
Changes fast the cost is borne
By grayheads from their pillows torn

To read the rest of these poems, and any of the many others in December’s Verse-Virtual, go to this link: http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html

To read a post on my blog prosegarden.blogspot.com about the poems of some other poems in December issue of Verse-Virtual, see this link:

http://prosegarden.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-garden-of-verse-facing-short-days.html