It's Been Awhile, So I'm Going Backwards

I did a lot of reading while away in the The Rockies—I hadn’t known that the Catholic Church is the largest landowner in the world, or that there once was a pontiff by the name of Pope Apple Pious. Snowbound, I read Shelly’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ three times in a row, once while watching a bluebird fly into the juniper tree and then fly out after stashing some juniper berries in her nest. What could possibly be a better name for a bird than bluebird? I also tuned into YouTube now and then, delighted to overhear Professor Irwin Corey say, ‘Without this great land of ours, we would all drown.’.

My sources in Wyoming told me we’re about to enter a new era in American politics—that the Open Graft Movement is gaining traction across the country and that candidates sponsored and endorsed by the Founding Fathers of the movement will win in a political landslide in the upcoming 2022 elections. I say Populism doesn’t work, that recent experiments make this clear, but I’m surrounded by extremists who lip-synch the literature from the campaigns of a variety of ‘populist’ candidates, the majority of whom went to Ivy League schools before receiving deferments from military service, or graduated with honors and then served with distinction in the armed forces, and promise to vote for even greater and greater defense budgets.

We’re in a political moment, no question, a time when the two sides could decide to begin to agree to work together for the common good but won’t, not having listening skills or the courage to compromise. Something too has to be done about celebrities who decide to run for public office! New law: that if a celebrity throws his or her hat in the ring he or she has first to spend time on a local school board or as commissioner of a water district etc., working from the bottom up and not from the top down as was recently the case in the matter of Donald Trump v. The People.

Nobody’s speaking up for me these days in either domestic or international affairs, nobody has my back, and so I’m party-less. Only poetry speaks up for me now; for the first time in my life poetry says more, has sharper teeth, offers more from a policy viewpoint than politics. Another way of looking at the situation—that there are so many poets now, and so many good ones, and so fresh and new, and so few good politicians. Perhaps having strayed from the gold standard, we could convert to poetry.