Poetry Friday: "History's Chalkboards"

Today I'll post "History's Chalkboards," the other poem that Adanna just published, the one that left my spouse visibly moved when I read it out loud.

I wrote it in August 2016 as the campaign season ramped into high gear. I couldn't get the Sylvia Plath quote out of my head, and the first part of the poem came naturally.

The last two stanzas drifted in my head as I wrote the first part.  For awhile, I thought I might have two poems here, but then I decided that they worked together.

Did I read Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" before I wrote these stanzas?  I think I was writing it, and the title came to me, and I looked it up and proceeded to read it.

When I wrote the poem, I couldn't imagine that Trump would actually be elected.  I'm still astonished.  I try to take comfort in the fact that our nation has had problematic leadership in the past and survived.  I worry that all of my apocalyptic fever dreams will soon come true.  I know that former great societies have burned to ash, but I also know that with some luck, better societies can emerge.




History’s Chalkboards

“Every woman adores a Fascist, 
The boot in the face, the brute 
Brute heart of a brute like you.”
                            “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath


Every woman adores a Fascist.
Turns out men do too.
But we imagine the boot
on someone else’s face,
a face that doesn’t look
like ours, the face that arrives
to take our jobs and steal
our factories, while laughing
at us in a foreign language.

No God but capitalism,
the new religion, fascism disguised
as businessman, always male,
always taking what is not his.

Brute heart, not enough stakes
to keep you dead.
We thought we had vanquished
your kind permanently last century
or was it the hundred years before?

As our attics crash into our basements,
what soft rains will come now?
The fire next time,
the ashes of incinerated bodies,
the seas rising on a tide
of melted glaciers.

And so we return to history’s chalkboard,
the dust of other lessons in our hair.
We make our calculations.