By Claudia Hollander-Lucas
I love how history can teach us – if only we’d remember it for current times – especially with rising tension around the upcoming presidential election, (re)surging wars on a global scale, and democracy under threat. This alphabet poem is in remembrance of the twentieth century when modernist art-invention, feminism, two world wars, a global depression and the Spanish Flu co-existed—new freedoms and dangers to threaten life as people once knew it. ~ Claudia Hollander-Lucas
This Ladder
~ a modernist abecedary for Gertrude and Alice during hard times
A
Book-ending of century wars, the
Catastrophes link, overlay invention—people
Do look up, check cellars the clever knots as
Each bird flies itself struck blind numbed see
Flocks gilt in lace cuffs rat-a-tat-tat the
Gas and honk overhead—
Have you not heard them ?
I
Joke not about pits, the masks to cement division—
Keep politics in your own soup cellar! some say.
Listen.
Mmmm (the moon…)
N ( nuanced )
Or not. Ezra Pound dined on Mussolini
Pasta, punctuated craft and the quickening
Quick—hide those guns! the brandy! the cheats!
Reason finds tender buttons wrote Stein, while her brother
Scarcely changed. Moved to Italy, scalded: warned:
Tell the judge you’re Perfectly Innocent
Under Any circumstance. Yours is a story of ubiquitous
Values. Capital un-well. poised under Construction. Here is
Where weeds turn edible—the Survivors connect (remembering)
X-actly. EX-act leeeeeY.
You wake between counties of Loyalty, Love, Fame. No
Zebra stripes in cargo cars, the ones G and A cunningly avoid, here
again:
A is for one (perfect) soldier his own Prime number
Brave. Alone. as moral a mind can be in a time of
Catastrophe that may bend him a traitor, a medal, or sentenced to
D ———— or E ————
Claudia Hollander-Lucas
