Politics and Free Verse
Here, Lies, the Profit
His is a faction under gawd
Embroidery mars each brow
with a brim creased to white
mantra like a seal bent,
reddened beyond blue.
Begotten, not made great,
an eagle decays with the shroud of Turin,
olive branch and arrows
one in being, a lesser Fuhrer,
as he flails allegation
toward activists, sailors, nations
with a stone rolled free
from the promised wall
towering in a language lost
to children bordered within a cage
not suited for manger
nor hideout under oval office
while the hatted chant the year.
Resurrection woke is blind of faith
when woke means a photo-op
planked in both eyes
when one walks upon walkers
— those moved to protest
in distance born of peace.
He ordered them dispersed,
flailed with gas and pepper,
trumped from the house of the people,
for a pose before a church
with the Bible clamped upended.
Indivisible, divided with pandemic,
denial made great to make light of black lives
united by a fall
under weight no knee should bear,
lies a president hyped on self-crucifixion
burdened with neither cross nor cure
in a movement he lauds all his own
so he may deny on the third day
that he rose from a bunker.
His is a faction under gawd lost to fact
unmasked in ribald of any fellow Judas
for worship and walls not held with Babel,
charred by Maillard reaction when flesh is seared
into a flag inlaid with thorns for stars,
under MAGA not INRI at the feat of the profit.
Inspired by the writings of James Knight, this poem is dedicated to those who are woke and those who are waking. Stand up or sit down, do it loudly or silently, but, I beg you, SPEAK OUT against injustice and corruption.
If you’d like to read more activism in free verse by Dionne Charlet, please click on the link below:
