They speak loud enough to prove their pedantry
speaking in bold espresso terms of Bush coming before shove
into an unjust war between Iraq and a hard peace
against a man everyone calls a tyrant,
to say the least
she speaks ex cafédra that democracy works only for an educated public
but the public is no longer educated, which she says so shrewdly
the coffee cools in the decanters; and her man seconds the motion.
She no doubt is educated beneath that new age
progressive bandana all democrat and rich, rich with the verse
of the New York Times, its ink on her hands though
she has New Hampshire mud on her boots which were
assembled in live-free-or-die China
she's a swelling progress and she just knows
I lean over and tell her she should run for president.
I ask her: Is there a more tedious group than these ignoramuses
wandering our voting-booth streets,
so blithely content to read the Union Leader
or the Wall Street Journal, utterly led by the nose by kneejerk polity?
and she nods so knowingly, her eyes deep with pity
and concern for the dulluminati, those big Texas idiots swaggering
thoughtlessly through the world of the refined political idea
who trample the lofty smart bombs of prose in the center-of-the-
universe New York Times' op-eds, the command center for all
the right ways to really, really think.
I tell her how I once was ridiculed for writing a quasi-patriotic
poem, allegedly wrapped in red, white, blue, celebrating freedom in the
quiet and the noise. But the flag is only red, I tell her, with blue and
white splashed upon it. No matter how fervent, the very
peace we choose floats on that red sea, always, forever, irreversibly
We can't make the whole flag white or blue or clear or even smart
and she begins to fling her mud
©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
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