Woman, seventy, mother of two
Grandmother of ten
A kind face and no criminal record.
Her surviving daughter and her brood
Three children, dirty smiling faces
They don’t know it but the rest of their life
Hinges on the next ten minutes,
An innocent answer to a subtle question.
Still, they’d rather be playing.
“The stars we are given.
The constellations we make.”
I’ll sign off for them.
Middle aged man, forty five,
Leg missing from knee down.
Barrel bomb he says,
Three years ago tomorrow
As I was serving coffee in my café.
His eyes, misty, he tells me
he lost his daughter that day
His wife too, and even though he
Has no papers, it all checks out.
“The stars we are given.
The constellations we make.”
I’ll sign off for them.
There were two sisters,
An uncle, four kids
A Grandmother
And two sets of neighbors
Whose lives were interwoven like
The fishing nets you see.
I asked the oldest woman how old she was.
Fifty Eight she had said.
In another room I asked her neighbor
How old is the woman next door
Sixty Eight she had said
So I asked the old woman why she had lied.
She always lies about her age
The little girl had said.
I’ll sign off for them.
“The stars we are given.
The constellations we make.”
steve 11/2015
"This is my original, but I should give credit to Rebecca Solnit, who provided
the recurring lines from the following quote: “The stars we are given.
The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos,
but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them,
the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.”
The inspiration for this came from a post I’ve seen floating around
by an immigration lawyer, talking about how hard it is to get into
the USA through the refugee program. He said that he had a
client that had lied about her age. and the poem sprang up in my
mind from there.
They say the House has passed a bill that would require the
DHS, NIS and FBI to "certify" these refugee's as not being ISIS before
they come into the country. I'm all for the new legislation. I hope the
president doesn’t veto it. Maybe then the FBI director will get off his ass,
get a team together, and stop whining about how impossible it is.
I saw a picture of a man with a kid on each hip coming ashore in
Greece. He looked pretty worried, a face full of care, desperate to
get his kids to safety. I cant guarantee he wasn't ISIS.
You want a Guarantee? Go to Best Buy.
But if I was in charge, and someone showed me that picture
I'd sign off on him. On the spot.
I guess thats what the poem is about.
the recurring lines from the following quote: “The stars we are given.
The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos,
but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them,
the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.”
The inspiration for this came from a post I’ve seen floating around
by an immigration lawyer, talking about how hard it is to get into
the USA through the refugee program. He said that he had a
client that had lied about her age. and the poem sprang up in my
mind from there.
They say the House has passed a bill that would require the
DHS, NIS and FBI to "certify" these refugee's as not being ISIS before
they come into the country. I'm all for the new legislation. I hope the
president doesn’t veto it. Maybe then the FBI director will get off his ass,
get a team together, and stop whining about how impossible it is.
I saw a picture of a man with a kid on each hip coming ashore in
Greece. He looked pretty worried, a face full of care, desperate to
get his kids to safety. I cant guarantee he wasn't ISIS.
You want a Guarantee? Go to Best Buy.
But if I was in charge, and someone showed me that picture
I'd sign off on him. On the spot.
I guess thats what the poem is about.
3 comments:
This is brilliant Bullets!
Yeah, thanks, but something has gone wrong with it. I tried to add some context and credits to it, butthe margins are all screwed up. blogger, for today, is broken.
Here is the additional text that has been corrupted somehow:
"This is my original, but I should give credit to Rebecca Solnit, who provided the recurring lines from the following quote: “The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.”
The inspiration for this came from a post I’ve seen floating around by an immigration lawyer, talking about how hard it is to get into the USA through the refugee program. He said that he had a client that had lied about her age. and the poem sprang up in my mind from there.
They say the House has passed a bill that would require the DHS, NIS and FBI to
"certify" these refugee's as not being ISIS before they come into the country. I'm all for the new legislation. I hope the president doesn’t veto it. Maybe then the FBI director will get off his ass, get a team together, and stop whining about how impossible it is.
I saw a picture of a man with a kid on each hip coming ashore in Greece. He looked pretty worried, a face full of care, desperate to get his kids to safety.
I cant guarantee he wasn't ISIS. You want a Guarantee? Go to Best Buy. But if I was in charge, and someone showed me that picture I'd sign off on him. On the spot.
I guess thats what the poem is about.
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