America First

Are we a family of nations or are we not? How did this

nation thing happen in the first place anyway where just

about every man woman and child belongs to one like

a fraternity or club Was it the different languages we spoke

Or is that a chicken before the egg kind of thing Because we

look different? No slant eyes here No blacks there We all

know the Americanized lily white Monet Europeans will

inherit the earth Not the Chosen People Not the Nazis nor

Japs Build that wall. Rousseau wrote about this: The man

who enclosed the first piece of ground was… How many

crimes wars murders stopped and mankind saved by pulling

out the stakes Like Woodrow Wilson and the League

of Nations Or Clinton (the philanderer) at the second Obama

Dem Convention: "Democrats believe we’re all in this together

is far better than you’re on your own" Not the selfish spoiled brat

hoarding all the kids’ toys causing him to be sent to his room

for a timeout. When my son was a little boy he fought with his sister

about who would sit in the front seat of the car And he was so sad

when his friend’s mother made brownies for school and the class

bully ate the last one and many many more before that one

and before my son had had even a bit of brownie to eat And John

Bolton’s now the new national security advisor Wants to bomb North

Korea and Iran too Thinks if you remove the top floors of the United

Nations nothing will happen When will the meek inherit the earth

Bolton's boss still loves hoarding kids' toys and gorging on brownies.

© Gil Hoy

America First bears a new threat: military force

Gil Hoy is a Boston poet and trial lawyer who is studying poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy’s poetry has appeared, most recently, in Ariel Chart, The Penmen Review, Right Hand Pointing/One Sentence Poems, The New Verse News and Clark Street Review.

Tarmac

I stood on the cold tarmac.

For common humanity,

I stood on a bleak runway

where charter planes roar and lift

into a heaven so blue that no-one

can believe the brutality of their flight.

I only stood to bear witness

as people, secret and guarded,

flew in transit to anywhere but here.

Deportees, unnamed and faceless, slipped

into faceless night, lost above the scattered nimbus

of an English evening with an anonymous dusk falling.

I could not bear the way we break ties of love or kin

to keep laws written for judges in cynical chambers.

I only stood on that cold tarmac to say ‘enough’,

for decency to prevail over sleight and shadow

and I saw those unwanted people scathingly

denied all human comfort for their going.

They are leaving, unwanted, according to rules

we made, rules we revise daily, all statutes

being mutable and subject to change.

I stood on the cold tarmac only to find the same law

take me as a terrorist, simply for standing there,

me, a terrorist, in the way of political convenience.

I was amongst others who believed in safe havens

for the persecuted, who believed we should

abandon no-one just to make up the numbers.

But they say, I am a terrorist, not because

I strapped explosives across my chest, not because

I held an AK47 in my trembling hands but because

I stood out on the cold tarmac in my dissent.

And those whose grim compassion is ash and cinder,

who name themselves righteous despite the terror

they inflict, will be my judge and jury.

Because I stood there, at the going down of the sun,

the law, once more an ass, would send me down;

knowing, as it does, neither love nor wisdom.

© Brian Hill

Activists are being charged under terrorism laws for the first time in Britain – this sets a dangerous precedent

Brian Hill. 50 years a poet. One-time designer and film-maker; long ago, the rhyme-slinger, cartoon cowboy, and planetarium poet; now feverishly stringing words together in the hope of making sense.

Brian blogs as Scumdadio (don’t ask).