My bread you snap

I read a WaPo headline the other day to the effect that Republicans in Red states are having difficulties passing anti-immigration bills because of pushback from business lobbyists. I didn’t read the story because, first of all—duh, but also because it’s just another case of FAFO. It turns out that without immigrants willing to work for low wages and no benefits, anything to do with the food chain—from tending the fields to bussing the restaurant tables—can’t survive. (Also, manufacturing, transportation, retail, construction and trades apparently have the same crap business model. They all depend on exploitation of the workforce to turn a profit, so without immigrants, they’re toast.)

Imagine that.

This year, we’re facing increased strains on the global food supply chain. Climate change has altered the geography of arable land, and violent weather has played up with crops. Tariffs have screwed farmer and consumer alike. Moreover, this moronic war of choice in the Middle East has not only sent the price of all petroleum-based fuels (and products) skyrocketing, but it turns out that a big chunk of the world’s fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which is now closed as a totally predictable (to everyone except the Kleptocrat, apparently) outcome of the attacks on Iran.

Yay—not only are prices of food going up, but we may all get to experience food scarcity. First hand.

Well, my entry for today in National Poetry Month is from the immortal Dylan Thomas, “The Bread I Break”.

You can read this on so many levels—literally on the process of what it takes to turn grain into bread and fruit into wine. It’s a commentary on humans pillaging the planet. It’s also an allegory of the sacrifice of Christ.

(Who in no way—physical or moral—resembles the brain-rotting occupant of the White House.)

“This Bread I Break”

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wine at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

Once in this time wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

Turns out humans are utter crap at appreciating sacrifice of any sort, whether it’s the chicken they’re frying or the god they worship. Yippee.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Killers in high places

I was introduced to Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” via one of my favorite Inspector Gamache novels by Louise Penny. That series is about a Québecois inspecteur du Sûreté and it’s centered around a Brigadoon-ish village some kilometers from Montréal. The villagers are a little on the fey side, and I do wish Penny had not given her protagonist a name that is so very close to the chocolate coating that goes on cakes and truffles, but the plots are generally quite good, and I do love police procedurals.

How the Light Gets In is one of the most powerful in the series, and Penny described Cohen’s generosity when she or her publishers wrote to ask him for permission to use part of the chorus as an epigraph. He gave it to her, without asking any fee.

Well, I’ve been thinking rather a lot about the notion that things (and people and nations) can be more beautiful—stronger, more valuable—for having been broken. I want to believe it, but I know there’s a difference between a crack and utter destruction. I hoped we could stop the damage before we get to that place, but I fear we’re already there. We will have a lot of work to do to repair the damage a few greedy powerful white men are doing.

I'm also thinking about the Japanese art of kintsugi—repairing cracks in pottery with gold. In a visual sense, that's surely letting the light in, isn't it? Viz:

I’m giving you today’s National Poetry Month entry as a poem, because I’ve always thought of Cohen as a poet rather than a songwriter. Also, I’m not that wild about the melody of this one. I’ve also cut the chorus until the last one.

“Anthem”

The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
Has passed away
Or what is yet to be
Yeah the wars they will
Be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold
And bought again
The dove is never free

We asked for signs
The signs were sent
The birth betrayed
The marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
Of every government
Signs for all to see

I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
And they're going to hear from me

You can add up the parts
You won't have the sum
You can strike up the march
There is no drum
Every heart, every heart to love will come
But like a refugee

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)
That's how the light gets in
Ring the bells that still can ring (ring the bells that still can ring)
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)
That's how the light gets in
That's how the light gets in
That's how the light gets in

Can we be kintsugi? Can we let the lights in through the cracks? Can we try? 

 

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Gratitude Monday: He fathers-forth

Particularly in our current environment, one of undeclared class warfare that pits the oligarchs against everyone else on every field—economics, environment, education, politics, religion, resource allocation—I struggle with maintaining any kind of spiritual, emotional and mental balance. So I make a conscious effort to absorb and honor the beauty and grace in my daily life.

As I do, I follow the prescription of an old photography professor—when something strikes me, I also try to look around for another perspective, to see if there’s not something else about it equally beautiful.

Viz:

I went out to glory in the dogwood in my cluster, which of course were spectacular.

But so, too, was the shadow it threw on the sidewalk.

This reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty”, today’s entry for National Poetry Month. Just the first line opens me up for the joy and the loveliness that’s all around us, in both nature and the work people do to make our lives easier.

You might call it "God's DEI program."

“Pied Beauty”

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.

 

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

To be led by a fool

Like many writers of science fiction, Octavia E. Butler used the “otherworld” settings of her novels to explore a variety of themes, including African American spiritualism, characterizing survival as heroic in itself and criticizing hierarchies. Her work won many writing awards, as well as a MacArthur Fellowship (you know—the “genius” grant).

She’s not known primarily as a poet, but she used poems to frame her prose.

Butler set her two-book Earthseed series in a post-Apocalyptic Earth. In the 2020s. (Parable of the Sower was published in 1993; Parable of the Talents in 1998.) She prefaced each chapter with a poem. My entry for National Poetry Month today is from Chapter 11 of the former; it does seem appropriate.

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Sneer of cold command

As I understand it, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the pharaoh Rameses II; I do not know whether it refers to the Egyptian’s mama and combat boots. The only reason I know of him is because Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a poem about the pathetic and pointless remains of a self-aggrandizing tyrant of former times.

Even in high school, the arid arrogance of the colossus’ broken old statue struck me. Back then, I didn’t know Ozymandias was real. Now that I do, I give him more credit than I did—Rameses the Great had chops. He was a warrior king, successful in battle. He brought wealth to Egypt. He built temples, tombs and art works. He’s also posited as the pharaoh of the Exodus, and apparently looked a lot like Yul Brynner.

Shelley does a bang-up job taking the piss here, and I’ve recently been struck by how applicable this description is to the current occupant of the White House. Cadet Bonespurs projects all the megalomania the poet documents, but with none of the accomplishments to give substance to the broken monument. We certainly recognize the wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command manqué. I really don’t much fancy thinking about his vast and trunkless legs, thank you very much, but I’d pay real money for a glimpse of a shattered visage half-sunk in sand.

As to looking on the Kleptocrat’s works—the destruction, corruption and misery that have been his focus since he first announced his candidacy—yeah, I do despair. We are in danger of becoming the wasteland that Shelley limns, boundless and bare around the decay of that colossal wreck.

“Ozymandias”

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Thy pride of might shall be thy shame

For some reason, I’ve been thinking about “Pride of Man” for the past couple of weeks. Hamilton Camp wrote it in 1964, but its apocalyptic lyrics seem to be exactly spot on 62 years later.

There are a lot of covers out there—best known may be the one by Quicksilver Messenger Service. But I’m going with Gordon Lightfoot’s, as he gives it just the right amount of urgency for our times.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Wherever the damned do chiefly abound

I first ran into Jonathan Swift in high school, when I did a paper on the Anglo-Irish hostility. You know—the “hostility” that started in the 12^th Century, when Henry II used the excuse of the Irish Church’s refusal to follow the Gregorian reforms (the ones that stick in my mind being monks’ tonsures and celebration of Easter) invaded Ireland.

The fusion of Mother England and Celtic Ireland has produced nearly 800 years of literary giants: Oscar Wilde, Seán O’Casey, Oliver Goldsmith, George Bernard Shaw, C.S. Lewis, J.M. Synge, Bram Stoker, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Swift among them. Swift, born in 1667, straddled Ireland and England literally, born in Dublin, spending much of his early adulthood in England and then return to Dublin where he was Dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral from 1715 until his death in 1745. You may know him as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, where we get a taste of his ability to use humor to skewer the many ills he saw in the world.

The one that imprinted on me was A Modest Proposal (full title being A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick), in which Swift solves the problem of poverty in Ireland by permitting parents to sell their children as food to what we’d today call members of the 1% (English 1%, to be precise). In quintessentially Swiftian fashion, he mocks the heartlessness that the 1% still show to the poor. It’s deadly.

Swift was politically active, first for the Whigs and then for the Tories, and (as evidenced by Proposal and other writings) he was vehemently opposed to Britain’s Irish policies. He managed to get up Queen Anne’s nose, and lost his ecclesiastical appointment in England. Saint Patrick’s, Dublin, was outside Anne’s gift, so that’s where he ended up. Toward the end of his life he became obsessed with death, and suffered from mental illness, quarreling with friends and growing increasingly isolated.

Today’s entry isn’t titled; it’s a concise disquisition on the nature of hell. It strikes me as being timely, nearly 300 years later. Same players, same outcomes. So much for progress.

All folks who pretend to religion and grace,
Allow there's a HELL, but dispute of the place:
But, if HELL may by logical rules be defined
The place of the damned -I'll tell you my mind.
Wherever the damned do chiefly abound,
Most certainly there is HELL to be found:
Damned poets, damned critics, damned blockheads, damned knaves,
Damned senators bribed, damned prostitute slaves;
Damned lawyers and judges, damned lords and damned squires;
Damned spies and informers, damned friends and damned liars;
Damned villains, corrupted in every station;
Damned time-serving priests all over the nation;
And into the bargain I'll readily give you
Damned ignorant prelates, and counsellors privy.
Then let us no longer by parsons be flammed,
For we know by these marks the place of the damned:
And HELL to be sure is at Paris or Rome.
How happy for us that it is not at home!

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Ignore the damnation of Faust

Today is the day the suckers and losers—which is to say, everyone in the lower income brackets, who cannot engage in sheltering income offshore or writing off everything as a deduction—file and pay federal taxes.

I, personally, do not object to being taxed; I consider it an entry fee for the life I’ve enjoyed in this country. I’m not wild about some of the things my government chooses to spend its revenue on, but I figure it mostly balances in the end. The construction and maintenance of physical and social infrastructure, providing healthcare and education, a well-trained and equipped military, foreign aid programs that support our strategic national security interests, disaster relief here and abroad: if I have to subsidize the naming of a community center in Alabama for some asshole ex-football coach in exchange for these things, I’ll suck it up.

But I cannot tell you how much I resent paying taxes to this administration—I hated doing it the first time around, but now I’m waiting until the absolute last fucking minute to send my payment. Because not only is the Kleptocrat finding ways to skim off public funds that even mafiosi haven’t though of, but he, Musk and the Republicans are destroying enormous parts of the government, in addition to ensuring that the billionaire boys club contributes even less than it has in the past (and violating data privacy laws to enable future lawlessness).

So my entry for National Poetry Month today is from Charles Bukowski, 20^th Century German-American poet, rebel, novelist and subject of FBI surveillance (on account of his writing in an underground LA newspaper). The MAGA crowd would despise him.

making it

ignore all possible concepts and possibilities ---
ignore Beethoven, the spider, the damnation of Faust ---
just make it, babe, make it:
a house  a car   a belly full of beans
pay your taxes
fuck
and if you can't fuck
copulate.
make money but don't work too
hard --- make somebody else pay to
make it --- and
don't smoke too much but drink enough to
relax, and
stay off the streets
wipe your ass real good
use a lot of toilet paper
it's bad manners to let people know you shit or
could smell like it
if you weren't
careful

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

Melt this ICE

I found today’s poem for National Poetry Month on the socials; most likely on Bluesky. So short, so intense; a shiv between the ribs, straight to the heart.

The poet, Rick Lupert, is from Los Angeles and very active in the poetry scene there.

“poem”

America,
so Pretti.
America,
so Good.
Oh, sun,
melt this ICE
until we are

America
again.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

As a pilgrim

Today at sundown, Yom Hashoah begins. This is the day commemorating the Holocaust. And in a time where RWNJs around the world are attempting to enucleate anything and everything from the past that does not comport with what passes for their worldview, it’s more important than ever to remember history, lest we be doomed to repeat it.

It's also Gratitude Monday, and my selection for National Poetry Month is therefore Avrom Sutzkever’s “1980”. Sutzkever was born in what is now Belarus; raised first in Siberia, then in in Vilna, Lithuania, and began his literary career at the age of 17, in 1930. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he and his family were moved to the Vilnius Ghetto; he and other writers hid works by Herzl, Chagall and others behind walls, saving them for the future. Following the Germans murdering his mother and his newborn son, Sultzkever and his wife escaped from the ghetto, and he fought as a partisan against the Nazis. After the war, he testified in Nuremberg at the trial of the man who murdered his mother and son; he and his wife lived for a while in Poland and then Paris, before moving to Palestine (as it was then).

Sultzkever wrote first in Hebrew but shifted to Yiddish.

During an Aktion in 1941, Sutzkever escaped to the countryside and was hidden by a peasant woman named Yanova Bertushevitz; she and her husband kept the poet in their cellar and managed to smuggle food into the ghetto to his family. (I must insert a note here: last week Israel issued a threat to any Christians or Druze in Lebanon who might consider sheltering Muslims/Arabs from invading IDF forces.) Eventually his worry about the danger to his protectors and his family led him to return to Vilna, but he did not forget her gift to him.

“1980” expresses Sutzkever’s gratitude for her courage, kindness and humanity. It’s therefore the right poem for today—eve of Yom Hashoah and Gratitude Monday—and also for the times: we all need to be reminded that, even in a hateful and violent environment, we can choose to be human, kind and courageous.

Because whoever saves one life saves the world entire.

“1980” 

And when I go up as a pilgrim in winter, to recover
the place I was born, and the twin to self I am in my mind,
then I'll go in black snow as a pilgrim to find
the grave of my savior, Yanova.
She'll hear what I whisper, under my breath:
Thank you. You saved my tears from the flame.
Thank you. Children and grandchildren you rescued from death.
I planted a sapling (it doesn't suffice) in your name.
Time in its gyre spins back down the flue
faster than nightmares of nooses can ride,
quicker than nails. And you, my savior, in your cellar you'll hide
me, ascending in dreams as a pilgrim to you.
You'll come from the yard in your slippers, crunching the snow
so I'll know. Again I'm there in the cellar, degraded and low,
you're bringing me milk and bread sliced thick at the edge.
You're making the sign of the cross, I'm making my pencil its pledge.

                                                    Translated by Cynthia Ozick

 

©2026 Bas Bleu