Saturday, July 27, 2019

Sestina poem for Bernie Sanders

Way back in 1986, poet Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem about Bernie Sanders. I am no Allen Ginsberg, but today I offer a recent sestina poem I wrote in Bernie Sanders' voice (words my own, but inspired by Bernie).

A sestina is a poetry form comprising six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet. All stanzas have the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern. All six words appear in the closing three-line envoi.

The six words in this poem are: grassroots, billionaires, our, wages, street, debt.
##

Bernie Sanders Sestina
(in the voice of Bernie, words are mine)

was it worth a lifetime dedicated to grassroots
ideals, while one percent of our wealth lies in billionaires’
hands? I’m old, you’re young, it’s Our
Revolution, to speak up for higher wages,
to call out the special interests, Wall Street,
the cushy expungers who’ve left us in debt.

it’s not to Congress, but to you I’m indebted,
let’s take the grassroots
to the White House, take our voices into the streets,
hold onto what’s valuable save the greed of billionaires,
max up the minimum wage,
declare health and education ours.

will it take the time Egyptians built the pyramids for our
younger generation to pay off their student debts?
can we expect wage slave owners to automatically offer decent wages?
would a skyscraper bow down to its landscape of grassroots?
could a pseudo-billionaire promise to make us all billionaires?
will this highway to hell we’re on pave over our hometown streets?

to comprehend our grave issues doesn’t require street
smarts. Or a math degree to see the tatters of our
economy. There’s been an uptick of billionaires,
yet with heads barely above water, the body politic now drowns in debt,
if we’d grab one end of a rope at the grassroots,
we might buoy up our backsides with a living wage.

corrupt leaders don’t believe that the wages
of sin is death. They look at our powerful words as bearing no street
value. Lavish lawn parties are their idea of grassroots.
they believe in holding our
infrastructure, climate future & immigrant children as bargaining tools, debts
that everyone in America will pay for, except the billionaires.

the rich in compassion and action are our spiritual billionaires,
but big business and big pharma won’t pay their wages,
to look out for one another should be our primary debt,
instead of chasing the empty dream of easy street,
it’s not my America, or your America, or their America, but our
America, that wouldn’t have happened from the get-go without the grassroots.

might even billionaires soon awaken to grassroots ideals? To realize equal
wages are for all our benefit? Banded together, might we finally arise from
sewer depths of debt to solid street level? Sound pretty good?

                                                           ~ Cynthia Gallaher




Share/Bookmark