Ending With a Bang and Content Warning—National Poetry Month 2025

 

 

She might not look like it in this photo but Writer C.S.E. Cooney was one pissed off woman.

I was preparing a final post for National Poetry Month when I rediscovered this ultimate post from 2021.  The Coronavirus was new.  The whole nation was hunkered down.  We had no idea that would still be going on or that we would be so weary and jaded by the whole thing and we pretended it was over.  And we were still reeling from the aftermath of attempted coup d’etat and Siege of the Capitol.  We were beginning to adjust to the possibility of actual civil war.  Four years later scores of miscreants have gone to jail, mostly pathetic small fry while the powerful sponsors of treason remained uncharged and siting in Congress and in governor’s mansions.  Back then multiple folks shared this stunning poetic rant on Facebook and other social media.  It was raw with rage and grief, but it dared to speak to what many of us felt during the pandemic cum charnel house as yahoos, cult zombies, and outright fascists paraded around egged on by the White House and bankrolled by deep dark pockets demanding their rights to spit in the face of the rest of us, kill us and our loved ones.

The isolation, anxiety, and rage of the pandemic is echoed again  as Trump II. The writer C.S.E. Cooney lives and works in Queens, New York City. According to her web site she is an audio book narrator, the appears as the singer/songwriter Brimstone Rhine, and is the author of Desdemona and the Deep and the World Fantasy Award-winning Bone Swans: Stories.  Her work includes three CDs : Alecto! Alecto!, The Headless Bride, Corbeau Blanc, Corbeau Noir, and a poetry collection, How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes. The latter features her 2011 Rhysling Award-winning The Sea King’s Second Bride.

Note—this is not for the prissy, the weak of heart, or any knee jerk on-the-other-hand types.

Content Warning

if that is freedom, fuck it

i don’t want it

to walk bare as a genital wart in the mayo clinic

swollen with liberty, flying the colors of the flag

fuck it, fuck your freedoms

give me plexiglass prisons, given me wardens in hazmat

give me solitary confinement

give me an oubliette

so I can forget

you and your fanfaronade freedoms

 

to hold my dying elder’s hand in hospice

that is freedom

you, your ilk, you kick it to dust

you kick it to dust with your leather shoes

to meet at feast together, eat together

marry on the day we choose

let our doctors see their children again

such freedom

you crush with as much disgust as the snake

beneath your heel

 

my venom grows

every night, every morning

chokevine murderthoughts

thorn and strangle me:

the freedom to be kind, to forgive

to live and let live

all flayed away

I am a criminal in my own mind

I deserve my chains

 

I don’t know what you deserve

(to do time for war crimes is what you deserve)

I don’t know what you think you deserve

but you take it anyway

no matter what it takes away from

all the rest of us

 

my friend, swaddled like a sarcophagus in the morgue

for one last look at her sister’s face

my friend, in her lonely hotel room, decontaminating her scrubs

while she Skypes with her cat

my friend, who stares out the window as Washington Heights

bangs its pots and pans

so tired, too tired to join the humble éclat, tired

from doing nothing, from staying inside, keeping the city safe

 

you spit in the face of my friends

you spit in the face of my friends

you little shit

you little shit

 

—C.S.E. Cooney

The Old Man’s I Can Relate to That Verses—National Poetry Month 2025

 

These two poems are personal.  Sort of.  They were not written to or about me and the poets presumably are totally unaware of my existence on the planet.  But each provided an ah-ha moment of personal recognition for me as a person of advancing age in increasing decrepitude.

 

Sydney Lea.

Sydney Lea is a poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and professor, and was the Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011 to ‘15.  His most recent book is The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, a graphic mock-epic poem in collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka—how utterly Vermont to have a Cartoonist Laureate.   His thirteenth collection of poetry, Here was published 2019.  He founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and Virginia Quarterly Review.  Lea has taught for the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Dartmouth College, and at Yale University, Wesleyan University, Vermont College, Middlebury College, Franklin University Switzerland, and the National Hungarian University. 

A cabin and the Montana night sky.

Reckoning struck me first because it opens in the state of my birth under the vast starry sky of the West that was such a part of my childhood and then because it shifts to the lights of a big city—Gotham for him, the Windy City for me.  I have no son, but daughters, I hear their voices thirty years ago—the bored indifference to those same Montana mountains and eagerness to find a mall—any mall—in the small towns among the pine smells.  The children of those two eldest daughters are grown now and one has a laughing toddler of his own.  My third and youngest lives with us now with her almost five year old daughter.  I wonder if Matilda will walk by the hand with me to find the elf door in a rotting tree in a remnant wood or a flop-eared rabbit in a cage.  I, too, feel some sort of transgenerational connection.

Reckoning

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

         —Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader

 

Once, on the steps of a cabin in wild Montana,

just before dawn I stood stunned

by that delirium of stars.

I’ve looked from a friend’s apartment in New York

at nine o’clock in the evening,

likewise astounded by countless windows.

Light everywhere. Light everywhere. And dark.

 

Coleridge opined that the sublime

can make us feel like nothing.

I’m sure I’d have known as much without him.

The older I become the less I aim

at epic self-expression.

It’s best, I think, as I didn’t always,

to keep my counsel in face of sights and themes

 

that lie beyond my ken, right where they’ve lain

lifelong, though once ambition

obscured all that. But I check myself:

I’m no more nothing, in fact, than anybody.

My memory feels boundless,

and if it fetches no sublime,

still moments may be fashioned into stories.

 

As randomly as I might choose a star

or a single light from some high-rise,

I summon a time—or it summons me—

when I and my son, then just three years old,

walked through a patch of woods

to spy on a hidden beaver pond.

I longed for this adventure to unfold

 

exactly as it did. The wind came right,

and just enough of day

remained for both of us to see

three beavers swimming, a mere five feet from where

we crouched in pond-side reeds.

Clear as judgment in my mind,

the rasp of roost-bound crows, thick August air,

 

that tannic orange of the cruising rodents’ teeth.

My son appeared transported

as we left the place by early starlight.

“How was it?” asked his mother back at home.

“Oh, Mom! You should have seen!

There were some bugs in the water! They all were swimming!

All of them were swimming around and around!”

 

In my twenties then, I didn’t know

how not to feel let down.

I know some things today, that is,

that compensate for slackened aspiration.

That child is forty-seven,

his children much older than he was then.

I study my boy. I’m lost in speculation:

 

I resembled him, I hope, in intending kindness.

In my case, though, vague zeal

distracted my heart and mind and soul.

He’s taking his daughter to ski this afternoon.

They’ll command an epic view,

yet it may be only the shape of a mogul

or cloud that, come the evening, she’ll retain.

 

And my son? He has perhaps already traveled

like me to where all types of light are local.

 

— Sydney Lea

The next poem was shared just a few years ago on Facebook by my best friend from high school, Jonathan Ben Gordon, now a retired Cantor.  

  

                             Camisha L. Jones.

Camisha L. Jones is the author of the chapbook Flare published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. She received a 2017 Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship from the Loft Literary Center.  She served as the managing director at Split This Rock, a national nonprofit that cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change.  According to the Deaf Poets Society blog Jones “lives with fibromyalgia, Ménière’s Disease, and an adamant commitment to keep her writing life from scorching on the back burner.”  She lives in Herndon, Virginia.

At first glance it would seem that I would not have much in common with a young deaf Black poet.  Certainly I am not deaf but I am hard of hearing due to prolonged exposure to industrial noise and ear-bleeding rock and roll as a young man.  Before I finally got hearing aids I had plenty of those I’m-sorry-I-can’t-hear-you moments, especially when I clerked overnight at a gas station/convenience store  to exasperated customers whose lottery and cigarette requests I could not quite make out.  Equally annoyed was my wife who got tired of repeating herself over and over.  Things are mostly better now if I “have my ears in.”  But why the hell do they whisper on all of my favorite TV dramas?  And don’t get me started on garbled phone calls.  

 

                                                "Sorry, I can't hear you."

Disclosure

I’m sorry, could you repeat that. I’m hard of hearing.

To the cashier

To the receptionist

To the insistent man asking directions on the street

I’m sorry, I’m hard of hearing. Could you repeat that?

At the business meeting

In the writing workshop

On the phone to make a doctor’s appointment

I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-so-sorry-I’m-hard-for-the-hearing

Repeat.

           Repeat.

Hello, my name is Sorry

To full rooms of strangers

I’m hard to hear

I vomit apologies everywhere

They fly on bat wings

towards whatever sound beckons

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry

           and repeating

                       and not hearing

Dear (again)

I regret to inform you

I       am

here

 

—Camisha L. Jones