For Random Learning Comes: Essays Fiction and Poetry by Andrea LeDew
For Random Learning Comes
For Random Learning Comes: Essays Fiction and Poetry by Andrea LeDew
I could not resist one more petulant political poem. Hope you see brighter days ahead! Thanks for coming by to read. They’ve stolen all I have from me, They’ve pulled the rug below. They’ve cheated most contemptibly, Outrageously, my foe. Conspired, this league of pedophiles, To steal my lofty crown, And …
I came up with this poem after spending the afternoon yesterday in the Emergency Room, seeking to admit my husband who had COVID symptoms. As a family member of someone who has tested positive, I have to quarantine as well and remain vigilant to symptoms. Fingers crossed, all will be well. We have all …
This poem talks of cakes and circus clowns, but its mood is anything but celebratory. I am sure there are those out there besides me, longing for truth in this age of prevarication and bait and switch. If only we knew what lay under all that frosting. Thanks for coming by to read! …
This poem has to do with the unbelievable situation many of us seem to find ourselves in, where up is down and left is right, where very little in life is predictable or easy. We find we are wide awake, but we cannot believe what we are seeing. The expression “Beyond the Pale” in …
I said in my last post, that this is not the time for satire. But if you can’t laugh now, how can you cope? I used the image above, that of a window, to illustrate my point. The broken window above no longer functions as a window. So if I described it as …
Now is not a time for satire, with our president in the hospital and infected with coronavirus. I’m sure I am not alone in wishing the President a speedy recovery. Him, and the other 7 million or so in our country who have contracted this illness. But I am probably also not alone in …
This poem was written in 2004. As many of you already know, Election Day in the US is held on a Tuesday. Roughly half the people, by the time they wake up on Wednesday, are disappointed at the result. In 2004, I was one of those. The election followed a series of deaths …
{Today, news is breaking about the President’s tax records, which have, through considerable effort, been kept from the public, for an entire term. These documents may hold surprises, for some voters. They may confirm the suspicions of others. And they may be completely disregarded by others, as irrelevant propaganda. People see what they want …
The latest in my series Sixty Days, leading up to the 2020 US Presidential Election, I set this poem on United Flight 93, in the moments before passengers rose up against their terrorist hijackers. It exhorts those on board to not just sit there, but do something! Flight 93 is the plane that …
{In this poem, I draw on the tragedy of the Fall 2020 wildfires out West for my metaphor. Which, as it happens, applies just as well to someone in the East. Part of the series Sixty Days, leading up to the US Presidential election. Thanks for stopping by to read!} Shouting “Fire!” …
This is the fourth post in my series, Sixty Days which I began sixty days before our presidential election. I thought I might take a trip down memory lane in the next few weeks, with poems, stories and blogposts I have written during the Trump Presidency. Most of them were influenced by current events …
{This is the third post in my series Sixty Days. I began the series, when it was sixty days before our 2020 presidential election. I thought I might take a trip down memory lane in the next few weeks, with poems, stories and blogposts I have written during the Trump Presidency. Most of them …
{It is now Sixty Days before our presidential election, and I thought I might take a trip down memory lane in the next few weeks, with poems, stories and blogposts I have written during the Trump Presidency. Most of them were influenced by current events at the time, and so will serve as a reminder …
{This is the first post in my series Sixty Days. It is now sixty days before our presidential election, and I thought I might take a trip down memory lane in the next few weeks, with poems, stories and blogposts I have written during the Trump Presidency. Most of them were influenced by current …
The events of this past week in Minneapolis, where I spent part of my childhood, have been very upsetting and disturbing to me. First, the horrible acts in the video we all saw, from many angles: In the course of an arrest for a petty crime, a white policeman, aided by his fellow officers, …
This poem was written in July 2018 in response to a prompt from What Pegman Saw. a writing challenge based on different locations in the world each week. This poem is set in Kinshasa, which was once part of the Belgian Congo, Africa. It talks generally about statues portraying King Leopold of Belgium. You can …
I first posted this poem in 2018, after watching a dramatic series about real bacteriologists in Germany, who fought to vanquish cholera through the scientific method, in 1888, and won the Nobel prize for it. There are many parallels to today’s situation and the race to find a vaccine for coronavirus, from the fierceness …
I wrote this poem a few years ago when my son with autism was attending art therapy classes at a place called Indigo Art Therapy. The Indigo was taken from the concept of Indigo children, who were a class of children who didn’t necessarily do that well in school but were brilliant and creative …
This is poem about a public servant's fall from grace because of his refusal to pledge loyalty to the king.
In this poem an engineer confronts a thorny problem with no apparent solution.
This essay was first published in early 2018, the day after the Parkland massacre in South Florida. A young man returned to his high school –named after Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, the author of River of Grass, a scientific love song to the Florida Everglades. He then proceeded to open fire, killing seventeen students. With …
I wrote this poem in 2017 as a belated addition to the many voices of the “Me Too” movement. Now, we mourn the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court Justice. She did much to advance the cause of women’s rights and disability rights (when will we just call them human rights?) It …
{I have included this poem in the series Sixty Days, because it deals with the theme of respecting Science, an attitude that has taken our country to the moon and beyond. It also points out how fragile the scientific mindset is. While this seventeenth-century scholar was ahead of his time in scientific thinking, he …
{I’m including this ditty as part of my series Sixty Days , leading up to the 2020 presidential election, because it reminds us of some rather grim times, and the way the administration has responded to dire emergencies. This was first published in the summer of 2017, a very busy season for natural disasters. …
