Real news, a poem by Jane Kenyon

Real news, if anywhere, is in the crime report of your local paper, the one thrown on your front step once or twice a month or stacked just inside the door of the little shop where you drink your coffee, the more local the better. Real news radiates outwards from the crime report to where it finally becomes big business and then a government by the people and for the people, in which a tiny pack of wealthy elites appoint one another to positions of power in order to rule over the poor saps who voted for their own subjugation. "Follow the money" they say, the real news journalists, and you'll see tracks leading to where the power is. Once you get there though it's not as clear as you thought it would be. In fact, it's either unclear or, worse, there's nothing there at all--no tower, no white house, no kremlin--or what's there isn't where it was said to be but is somewhere else.

Maybe the real news is where it's always been; right there in you, the one reading the newspaper, watching tv, seeking informed sources in order to be a good citizen, the one who, like me, comes closer every day to giving up both real news and fake news and receives far more necessary information from small well-crafted poems, like the poem Jane Kenyon wrote, I'm thinking, sometime in the 1980's: 

The Clothes Pin

How much better it is

to carry wood to the fire

than to moan about your life.  

How much better to throw the garbage

onto the compost, or to pin the clean

sheet to the line

with a gray-brown wooden clothes pin!