Wise Women Won't Wait Any More

Wise Women Won't Wait Any More

Saturday, February 3, 2018

Resistance and Insistence Poetry released by Wise Woman Press

By Faith Chatham -- Feb. 3, 2018

This is not our grandparents generation's volume of sonnets!

Not everyone can turn the frustrations and disgust we live through into poetry. San Antonio Tri Centennial poet, Carolyn Chatham's anthology of Resistance poetry is not a collection of flowery lyrics. She tells readers that "I am not the sweet old woman that you think I am." Her words flow from the place human beings encounter when they won't be quiet and take it any more.

The title "Those Bones That Float About" comes from the East Texas idiom used when a person looks you straight in the eye and says: "I've got a bone to pick with you!" These are not words that are used lightly, and they are not prompted by trivilities. They spring when harm has seeped past the coverings to the very foundations of our existence. Once picked dry,  they surface and cannot be hidden.

Released by Wise Woman Press  Carolyn's book, Those Bones That Float About, is available for pre-order on  on Amazon.com, at https://bit.ly/CarolynChatham.

School shootings, fires in California, Hurricane Harvey, gender, racial, economic and immigration discrimination inspire her poetry. One poem, Let's Make America Great Again, is to Colin Kaepernick.



Let’s Make America Great Again


Let’s make America great again,
bring back those good old days.
A man was head of his household.
Kids all toed the line.
A boy could be a boy and fight,
and we all got along just fine.
A man could be a man back then
so long as he was white.

Make America great again,
Let’s put the lid back on.
A baby every year or so
will keep those women home.

Plenty of eager hands back then
to mow our lawns and clean.
No laws to tell us who to hire,
or serve or educate.

Let’s make America great again,

restore the proper order.
Let’s keep those undesirables
on their side of the border.

Let’s make America great again,
bring back the holocaust.
The hanging trees are yearning for
the fruit that they have lost.

I will not stand for this,
This living in the past.
It's not "make America great again."
It's make her great at last.
I will not stand for this.

Take a knee, America.
We should not stand for this.


© 2017 Carolyn Chatham Used by Permission



In The Commander-in-Chief Eats Cake, she makes her opinion of the current resident of the White House clear.


The Commander-in-Chief Eats Cake


The Commander-in-Chief eats cake and smacks his lips, commenting how great it is
from his Mar-Lago resort.
The dark chocolate and orange skin are Halloweenish,
a rotten pumpkin shell.
He shovels dark icing
down a pink throat between sniffs.
His pudgy fingers and reptilian tongue lick brown goop from his too small mouth
centered obscenely on his bloated tangerine face.

While he gorges on cake,
bombs level mountains in Afghanistan,
vaporizing people he has never met or talked with,
whose names he cannot pronounce.
People who may or may not have been terrorists.
People whose children, wives, nieces and nephews are now most certainly terrorists.

Unconcerned for life unlike his own,
he licks his fingers
and announces the “Mother of All Bombs”
has been dropped on Iraq.
Or was it Syria?
Or maybe Afghanistan?
Anyway, it was one of those countries
where he doesn’t have a hotel
and where the people aren’t pink and orange like him
and nobody is asking about his ties to Russia today.

He is a spectacle, an alien thing, surely not human.
He belongs in a side show or science laboratory,
an alien life-form to be studied
then sent back to its cell,
and safely locked away.


© 2017 Carolyn Chatham Used by Permission






No comments:

Post a Comment