Essays Fiction and Poetry by Andrea LeDew
For Random Learning Comes
Essays Fiction and Poetry by Andrea LeDew
This poem is full of discouragement. This season, in many of our lives, has been very discouraging. Our lives have been full of COVID worries for over a year. And only now do we have the chance to survey the wreckage. So much time on High Alert has burnt everyone out, I suspect. Not …
Fair warning: This poem takes a turn for the worse, toward the end. It’s not often, that I can use the two keywords “morning” and “mourning” in the same piece. I’m sure many of you are as fond of early morning, as I am. At least, on those rare occasions, that I get a good …
This poem imagines the hive mind, or what Star Trek lovers will recognize as “the Borg“. I first heard the expression “hive mind,” when I listened to the Ezra Klein podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, when he was interviewing Cal Newport, author of A World Without Email. Transcript of podcast. Cal Newport seemed to …
This poem reflects on what the bizarre phenomenon of COVID has done to our mental health. I know my sense of security has been knocked down a peg or two! Constant worry is not a recipe for tranquility. And isolation is not natural, to us social beings. I hope you all are safe and …
This is a nostalgic look back at the many sides of motherhood. A toast to all the mothers out there and all they do! Thanks for coming by to read. Waking at a whimper. Nursing in the night. Like my mother’s mother’s mother Did, by candlelight. Picking up the messes. Dressing …
I remember long ago reading about a case, where a man burnt an American flag in protest. It took place outside Dallas City Hall, during Reagan’s Republican National Convention in Dallas in 1984. The man was arrested for desecrating the American flag, and appealed his case up to the Supreme Court. The case was …
And now, for a poem about our constant battle, to try to find the time to do things. And a suggestion, as to why it is so hard. Hope you are more successful at it, than I! Thanks you coming by to read! Who’s got time for poetry? And who’s got time for …
This poem is a lament about the amount of plastic we consume in our modern lives as Westerners, and where it all goes. My particular beef is with unnecessary and annoying packaging on children’s toys. But plastic is everywhere. May we all learn to be more mindful of our impact on the planet, before …
This is another poem on writing. I recently read a comment on a Facebook group by Patrick Gallagher. He essentially said to “get less precious about your writing, because the magic comes, when you don’t have any choice in the matter.” Using routines and other tortures to ensure regular writing is something most of …
This poem began when I noticed the roses budding up again, most aggressively. And in unison. Ready for all out war. Hope you enjoy it! Thanks for coming by! They come in gangs, the roses. They claw, and bite, and scratch. Their bolls, like bitten fingernails, Will grab what they can catch. …
This poem was, of course, inspired by the terrible condominium accident this week in Surfside, Florida, North of Miami Beach. A tall multistory building collapsed in the wee hours of the morning. At least four were killed and many more are missing (at last count 159.) The collapse was caught on film from several …
This poem describes the end of the kid stage of parenthood and the status that follows, called being an Empty Nester. Hope you enjoy it! So this is what it’s like, To nearly be An empty nester. No longer, do The chicks line up And follow, single file. The goslings grow Their feathers …
This poem strives to convey the notion of having a lot on your mind. My husband has always talked about this sense of overburdened panic as a box of Christmas lights, which you have to patiently go through, one by one, checking all the bulbs, untangling all the knots, until at the end, you …
This one’s pretty self-explanatory. Describing our Brave New World, to borrow from a famous title. Thanks for coming by to read! We wake in peace. We dress in peace. We eat, with mediocrity. We tend to needs, unspeakable, Without a thought to privacy. We read a book With opaque brains. We drive, …
I recently read an article in the German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, “Endlich Loslegen, #nachCorona.” (Translation: Finally getting started again, #afterCovid.) It describes the kinds of predictions people made on German Twitter, under the hashtag #nachCorona (after Corona) about what they would do after COVID died down. At least, to the point, that it …
I recently saw an interview in which someone commented, that “a healthy distrust of government” stemmed from the era of Nixon and Watergate. Shocked at the abuse of power, Liberals believed the press, and an informed populace, were the true checks on a politician’s limitless ambition. Distrust was considered a core tenet of liberal …
This poem was inspired by a TV interview with Jeff Shesol, the author of “Mercury Rising,” a book about the space program in the US. As he talked about John Glenn’s orbital mission (1962) being the starting point of his book, I realized, that many Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) were born or were tiny …
This poem was inspired by a heart-wrenching story in the New York Times out of Lima Peru, in which they described the plight of a fifty-year-old man, whose family fell prey to COVID in the month of May 2021. The epidemic is still running rampant in South America, where vaccines are very hard to …
This poem complains about the constant noise of modern life, and the incessant and often trivial demands for our attention. Sometimes, we just need to turn it all off. Wishing you relief, in this time of noise and bluster! For those who don’t know, Walter Cronkite was a news anchor on CBS in the …
I may be walking the line of civility with this poem. It describes the awkward position that many older people, who identify as white, find themselves in, as protests and expressions of racial discontent fill the airwaves. Having precious little to complain about, themselves, they feel compelled to declare themselves allies, to whatever group feels …
Perhaps I have watched too many episodes of Murdoch, a detective series set in the 1890s and early 1900’s. But I find myself yearning for a nineteenth-century point of view, where (I imagine) there would be no confusing good and bad, or wrong and right. In my high school days, we spoke with reverence …
This poem presents possible solutions to the problem of Global Warming, from the point of view of Planet Earth. But I’m afraid few of us humans–except maybe Elon Musk, who sometimes talks about living on Mars– would find these solutions satisfactory. Thank you for coming by to read! You’re trapped in the physical …
This is another of my character poems. Though I may exhibit some of these habits, such as traipsing down to the mailbox in my stocking feet and being less than perfect in my housekeeping, this is not me! I imagine a very lonely soul who fears the outside world and tries to avoid going …
I’m sure, I am not the first, to call attention to the greed and selfishness of Americans. That is, those, who live in these rather prosperous United States. (We in the US tend to forget that those in Canada, Mexico, Central and South America are also Americans!) But this week, with the agonizing footage …
