UnAmerican Activities
By Gerry Sloan
The chances of writing a successful
political poem are slim to non-existent,
but we keep rolling the boulder uphill
while the raven perched on our shoulder
keeps croaking like Bertolt Brecht:
"Why were their poets silent?"
Because we're the Forlorn Hope,
idealistic volunteers to be first
through the thermo-nuclear breach
since weapons of mass destruction
place notions of victory out of reach,
our leaders playing high-stakes chicken,
the absurdity of their rhetoric
enough to make a maggot sicken.
Gerry Sloan is a retired music professor living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. His poetry collections are Paper Lanterns (2011) and Crossings: A Memoir in Verse (2017) plus six chapbooks, the latest included in Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry (2022).
