Happy Birthday to a Resister

I don't have the energy for a new post, so I'll share the poem I wrote for DZ's late-February birthday. It celebrates all resisters, really.

 With Apologies to S. T. Coleridge

At Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump

A tacky pleasure-dome decreed:

Where gilded port-a-potties stood

Near wardrobes of endangered wood

            On carpets gone to seed.

A golf course and a salad bar

With shrimp imported from afar

And there were sycophants with noxious tones,

Inventing policies to screw the common man

And neo-Nazis on their private phones

Delivering to Trump whate’er he’d need.

But oh! that sleazy Mafioso fortress

Atop a swamp mosquito-bit and rotten

A slimy place! As fiendish and as hopeless

As e’er upon Floridian coast was buttressed

By fake flamingos and goods ill-begotten.

And in this sewer, with ceaseless turmoil boiling,

Steve Bannon with demonic helpers toiling,

The plan for deconstruction was affirmed:

It would not take more than a four-year term

To make insolvent agencies galore

And prop up corporations by the score

So with a flippant pen stroke did his boss

Confirm the fact he did not give a toss.

For miles around the people stood defeated

And wondered why they’d voted for the man

Whose rage and bluster seemed to mask a plan

To injure most those people most mistreated.

And ‘mid this tumult Trump heard from afar

Town hall protestors prophesying war!

            The shadow of old Mar-a-Lago

            Blackened half the sun-baked earth

            Where was heard the jingling laughter

            Of the one-percenters’ mirth.

It was a miracle discussed by scholars,

A pleasure-dome supported by tax dollars!                        

A damsel with a cellular

In a vision once I scanned:

It was a Dutchess County maid

And on her mobile phone she played,

Calling her Congressman.

Could I just clone her daily

Her energy and ire,

In time my own inertia’d fail me

And with phone calls loud and long

I’d bring down that dome of Trump’s,

That irksome dome! those hideous fans!

And all who’d been down in the dumps

They all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His pig-like eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round the man,

And beam him to his Russian friends

For this is where the nightmare ends,

And we begin to breathe again.    

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO A RESISTER.