Rage poem
I mean, they're all rage poems now, aren't they?
For the last twenty-five days, I’ve been writing a poem first thing in the morning after brushing my teeth and before doing anything else. I’m practicing this along with a few other women from my Literati Academy class while we are on hiatus. We write and then email our poem to the group: no comments or feedback. Just do the work and send it into the void.
I don’t ever share such lightly-edited first drafts of my work, and I’m a pacifist, but I’m so goddamn angry about everything—particularly about certain men in my orbit who roll their eyes and say everything is fake news. This poem is for them.
Neverending Ending
Here we come waking into another singing dawn
with the fresh hell of knowing that yet another hero,
another father of movement, a man who holds power,
is, of course, a groomer, a pedophile, and a rapist.
One more abuser of girls and women to add to the pile
that’s so high we can’t reach the top, only make it wider.
The people around him formed a protective shield,
of course, not to safeguard the women and children.
To preserve the pure image of their unimpeachable savior.
The women’s essential labor in the movement, as always
marginalized, and the monster at the center celebrated.
Once again, our feeds are filled with memes illustrated
by Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind—
Gérôme’s work voices our rage through another century.
When do we march away from the well, dagger in hand,
channeling Judith, to hunt for the rotted soul of Holofernes
in the army of sociopaths in power across the land and sea?
Cut off their heartless heads, sever their harming hands,
set the whole fetid pile of degenerate flesh on fire.
Livestream the righteous balancing of the scales so the
ones about to touch and take again can see with their own
empty eyes that their time is done. They’ll have no more.
I’ve written twenty-five poems after nearly a decade of writing none, and it’s a quiet joy in a noisily painful world right now. I’m excited to work on them, so I have new poems to share at Kent’s Jawbone Poetry Festival the first weekend in May for the first time in years. I may even start submitting again.
Yes.
Twenty-five mornings in a row — that discipline showing up in the writing itself, all that coiled energy. The Gérôme painting as a recurring thread across centuries of this exact anger is such a precise and devastating choice.