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
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