{ I wrote this in response to the whirl of activity going on in my life and in the world at the moment. Exhaustion and Apathy seem to walk hand in hand these days, and even I haven’t the energy, which I imagine it took, to be an activist in the explosive seventies. Enjoy, thank you for the prompt, and thanks for coming by to read!}
Waiting for an Uber,
Scrolling through the New York Times,
Doing what behooves her,
Sipping Starbucks, checking time…
But what’s this new infraction,
Slow-reported, line by line?
Foreign blackmail action?
Politicking? Crossing lines?
Just more noise. Her blurry eyes,
Dry from hours of dulling flight,
Lose their focus, look around.
People scurry left and right.
Hardly seems a profound moment,
As she shifts, adjusts her coat.
Hardly seems so pivotal.
Not deep at all. She clears her throat.
What was it Mother wrote to Dick,
Lambasting him, for lies, deceit?
What was it Nixon wrote her back?
“Thanks much for your support, my sweet!”
Where is that wholesome generation?
Buried, now, with Watergate.
Who has the time for scandal, now?
She clucked, and checked her watch:
Too late.
Copyright 2019 Andrea LeDew
Sixty Years
Okay, I just deleted everything I wrote and I’m starting over. I am having a little trouble seeing our younger generation as the most wholesome we’ve had in a long time. My work as a counselor showed me the underbelly of GenX, and it certainly wasn’t wholesome. Selfish, self-centered, and willing to live on daddy’s beneficence indefinitely.
Of course, I know they aren’t all like that.
I totally identified with the weariness of life as we live it these days. Checking the time and sucking down Starbucks. Yes.
Thank you so much for this insightful (I almost wrote “inciteful!” ) comment, granonine.
Although of course your comment is very measured and kind, and it is me who risked being provocative, by crossing the Rubicon into the political space.
I did worry a bit, before publishing, that I might be getting too political with this one. Sorry if that was the case. I think what is important is that people’s opinions, whatever they may be, come from a place of careful consideration.
With the word “impeachment” hanging out there, in the air, I could not resist recalling once, when such a proceeding touched my family.
I am with you that this sense of weariness and overbusiness is crushing all of us leaving little time for precious contemplation or for art.
No, I don’t think you were provocative. I remember the Nixon years well, since they took place shortly after we married. The crushing realization that the first President I voted for had been caught in lies was hard to bear. He resigned before he could be successfully impeached, and I feel he spared us, at least, from that awful process.
He’s certainly not the only one. Left and Right alike have been guilty of speaking out of both sides of their mouths. Sometimes I just weary of the whole process. My concern now is that the college-age youth truly seem to believe that socialism is the cure for all ills. It’s hard for me to understand, when all you have to do is look at Venezuela, among many others, to see how destructive it is. Well. Imperfect mankind will never find a perfect government, and it seems that men of honor are scarcer than hen’s teeth these days.
Scarcer than hen’s teeth! Great expression, granonine and too true. It would be comforting if everyone would learn to think for themselves, and refuse (another farmyard idiom) to be led around by the nose. (Referring to a pig, I think, with a ring on the end of his nose (his nose, his nose–as in The Owl and the Pussycat. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43188/the-owl-and-the-pussy-cat)
Somehow the nonsense of Edwatd Lear seems appropriate to the present moment. ?
🙂
In the book of Ecclesiastes, there is a reference to someone being a snare or a trap. I looked up the meaning in the Hebrew language, and “trap” referred to a ring in the nose of an ox, by which he could be led against his will. Quite a picture 🙂
I think in the children’s book, Ferdinand the bull has a ring in his nose as well: makes all the fashionable piercings of the past twenty years take on a whole ‘nother meaning!?
I liked this very much! I was very much in the moment with the speaker.
Thank you Liz! I think many of us can relate in this harried, crazy time we live in. ?
For sure!
Well done… just wondering what it has to do with the prompt pic, which doesn’t appear either…
A very tenuous connection as usual, Dale, but I hate missing a week of FF, and real life has torn me away for too long.
The original photo just seemed like a bustling public space, filled with people doing a multitude of things.
That reminded me, of making connections in busy airports, and the weariness you feel, when all of your time seems booked.
And that led me to the conjecture, that one’s ability to care about world events or even local politics is inversely related, to how busy one is.
And that led to thoughts of the sometimes dire consequences of not paying attention.
Voila! My poem. ?
P.S. my mom actually did write a letter like that to president Nixon before he resigned from office, and got a very similar canned reply, though somewhat more formally expressed.
My worry is that norms of behaviour in public office are being eroded on a daily basis. Who will be able to restore them? Your Nixon reference made me smile.
Perhaps there’s no more wholesome generation than the one coming to adulthood now. They’re the ones who’ll have to sort out the mess we leave. And then maybe the world will be unimaginably different
Let us hope so, Neil!
At first I wrote “hopeful generation” instead of “wholesome generation”. I wanted to get at the notion that people used to believe in their leaders, expect great things from them and call them to account when they failed. Not that their generation was any more pure than those before or since, but that they believed that their leaders were capable of doing great and good things, and that they should be punished when they do the opposite.
Today there seems to be a general malaise and indifference, a cynical assessment of how precious little any leader can be expected to accomplish, and how little we can reasonably expect, in terms of honor, morals or purity of motive.
This seems to me like an audience’s self-imposed tone-deafness, applauding or maintaining their silence, even when the “virtuoso” clearly has no business singing, and should by rights be booed off the stage.
nice flow and did not seem over the word count or wordy
— and loved how this line “Sipping Starbucks, checking time…” led us to the rest
Thank you Prior! Merciful “Seeming” does not always withstand the rigor of merciless Math. ?
Thank you Prior!