Sparrow Logic January 29, 2018

I try not to write political poetry. No, that's not quite what I mean to say. I have a difficult time writing political poetry. I can't seem to find the imagery for political ideas. Besides, politics is such a cumbersome bag to carry, and most of it comes off as just forcing your ideas onto another  person. And yeah, that would be okay, but it never gets you anywhere. You can't force a person to get rid of ideas that they have carried with them most of their lives, lies, yes, but they seem to the individual thinking them to be truths . . . and nothing but the truth. But sometimes you find an image, the structure, the words that can transform a political idea, a political observation into something palatable to the most stubborn ear. The message gets across in such a way the reader, the audience  can't or won't reject it. BUT if you camouflage your "opinion" too much in a piece of poetry . . . they won't get what you're really talking about. So, finding the balance between creating a political idea as an experience and not just hyperbolic  political gobbledygoo is the difficult part of writing political poetry.

Sparrow Logic

A rather large storm gathers itself

on the outer edges of the horizon.
Lightning flashes, loud roll of angry thunder,
too far away now to worry about.
But try telling that to the quarrel of sparrows
that house themselves in the elms that line
Trout Avenue. Already they’re chirping away,
flittering about from tree to tree hoping
that the storm to come will mistake
their panicky fear for courage and rage.
I would try to calm them, let them know
that the storm is still young and too far
south to worry about it much.
But have you ever tried to convince
a fidgety sparrow that its fears are
unfounded? Easier to convince a wall
that it isn't a wall, or change the mind

of a hawk who's set on believing

that he, and he alone, owns the sky.

Woodie o1-29-18