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

Children's dreams of chains and jails

For today’s National Poetry Month entry, we’ll go to Denmark. I did not know Inger Christensen (1935-2009) before now, but I really like her stuff. She didn’t view poetry as “truth” but as “a game, maybe a tragic game—the game we play with a world that plays its own game with us.”

Word.

One of her major works, Alfabet, combines the alphabet and the Fibonacci sequence, which deserves major props, and it’s very much in the “game” arena.

I’m giving you “From April: IV”, which has very striking—grotesque, even—imagery.

From April IV

Already on the street
with our money clutched
in our hands,
and the world is a white laundry,
where we are boiled and wrung
and dried and ironed,
and smoothed down
and forsaken
we sweep
back
in children’s dreams
of chains and jail
and the heartfelt sigh
of liberation
and in the spark trails
of feelings
the fire eater
the cigarette swallower
come
to light|
and we pay
and distance ourselves
with laughter.

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

I keep this from my children

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month comes from a woman who was trying to find words to explain the dangers of the world to her young children, and to give them hope, as well.

In the summer of 2016, a writer named Maggie Smith sat down at a coffee shop in Ohio and wrote “Good Bones” on a yellow legal pad. Three days after the mass murders at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, it was published in the literary journal Waxwing, and went viral (not something that often happens to things published in literary journals), because it expressed the pain and bewilderment of the world—in 2016 and since.

So much more now to keep from our children.

I think we should hold this one close, during these times.

“Good Bones”

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Come celebrate dictatorships and bolster the regime

Our earworm for National Poetry Month today is from the Irish-American Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys. Now in their third decade, the Quincy, Mass.-based Murphys are still living their principles: pro-union, anti-fascism, community building.

For 2026, they reworked their “Citizen C.I.A” into “Citizen I.C.E”, so here it is.

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Hold your babies tight

Something contemporaneous for today’s National Poetry Month entry.

I know nothing about the poet—I found it yesterday on Bluesky. He may be this Michael F. DuBois, writer/artist/filmmaker/poet. But I do know: this is the power of poetry.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

The darkness will leave this house

Women in pretty much every culture live lives of quiet resistance, learning to persevere possibly as early as through their mothers’ milk. No matter where you are, part of the tradition is almost certainly to make women less-than [whatever men are].

So we have learned to resist in small ways as well as large, despite being told over the centuries to shut up and make sandwiches. Poetry, of course, is one way of doing this. Poems are subject to interpretation, and somewhat like ciphers, unless you have the key, you can miss the message.

This is certainly the case with Iranian women poets. They call on the rich heritage of Persian poetry to frame their depiction of life under the ayatollahs, finding brightness where they can, facing darkness with resolution. The weapons of poetry—language, form, words—can strike with the force of a club, or slice like the sharpest Shamshir.

Siminbar Khalili, who wrote under the name Simin Behbahani, was one such. Coming from a progressive and literary family, she produced a body of work that earned her the sobriquet “The Lioness of Iran”. It also earned her nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature twice, in 1999 and 2002. (The Laureates for those years were, respectively, Günter Grass and Imre Kertész.)

As you might imagine for anyone known as a lioness, Behbahani made authorities uncomfortable. In 2010 at age 82, she was refused permission to leave the country; arrested and detained as she attempted to board a flight to Paris. She was released, but without her passport. If they thought to contain her strength, they were mistaken. She died in 2014, having never been allowed out of Iran, but her poetry remains as a source of strength and hope for us all. Viz: today's National Poetry Month entry.

“My Country, I Will Build You Again”

My country, I will build you again,
If need be, with bricks made from my life.
I will build columns to support your roof,
If need be, with my bones.
I will inhale again the perfume of flowers
Favored by your youth.
I will wash again the blood off your body
With torrents of my tears.
Once more, the darkness will leave this house.
I will paint my poems blue with the color of our sky.
The resurrector of “old bones” will grant me in his bounty
a mountains splendor in his testing grounds.
Old I may be, but given the chance, I will learn.
I will begin a second youth alongside my progeny.
I will recite the Hadith of love and country
With such fervor as to make each word bear life.
There still burns a fire in my breast
to keep undiminished the warmth of kinship
I feel for my people.
Once more you will grant me strength,
though my poems have settled in blood.
Once more I will build you with my life,
though it be beyond my means.

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

The meat of dictators

The first time I heard of Ken Saro-Wiwa was in the last week of his life, when Peter Jennings announced that the Nigerian environmental activist, writer and television producer had been hanged by his government for his protests against the multinational petroleum corporations that were destroying the resources of his homeland.

Saro-Wiwa was an articulate and unflagging advocate for the basic human right to a safe environment, clean water, the sharing of natural resources—which made him dangerous to the conglomerates and the military dictatorship in Lagos they’d paid for. His voice and his pen struck more terror than any firearm he might have wielded—had he ever chosen to, which he did not.

Dictatorships and multinationals—the bigger they grow, the more enraged they are by anyone not falling into line.

Saro-Wiwa’s non-violent campaign led to his arrest on trumped-up charges of murder; he was tortured and executed in 1995 at age 54, along with eight other leaders of his Ogoni tribe.

Families of the nine filed suit against Royal Dutch Shell the following year for human rights violations in the matter of their deaths. In 2009, just as the case was about to go to trial in Manhattan, Shell settled out of court, paying out $15.5M. The company continues to deny any wrongdoing, issuing one of those statements you hear every fucking time some guilty-as-hell politician, businessman or corporation settles out of court solely “to put the matter behind all parties.”

In this case, one of Shell’s mouthpieces intoned, “While we were prepared to go to court to clear our name, we believe the right way forward is to focus on the future for Ogoni people.”

Man, these oleaginous scumbags only seem to have one songbook to sing from, and it’s the same, sour tune every time.

It seems appropriate to remember this particular man as the US-Israeli war on Iran has sent the global oil markets into chaos—taking the world with them. You can’t escape the pall of oil in 2026, so we’re all at the mercy of whoever holds the Strait of Hormuz, which right now is a really pissed-off Iran. (How much of this is being done by the Kleptocrat to manipulate those markets is up for debate, but it’s definitely a factor in his greedy, ignorant, rotting brain.)

Saro-Wiwa wrote “The True Prison” in 1993, when he’d already been imprisoned twice without trial. He was arrested again in 1994 on charges of incitement to murder in the deaths of Ogoni chiefs. He was in prison for more than a year before his execution in 1995. There was outrage around the world at his hanging, but it didn’t seem to stop anyone from doing business there.

You remember about the oil, right?

There are so many lines in this poem that make me want to weep—for Saro-Wiwa and his people, and for me and my people, both then and now. Do these not resonate with you—cowardice masking as obedience, security agents running amok for such low wages, lies pounded into a generation’s ears? He has cut to the heart of the tragedy with not a single word too many.

“The True Prison”

It is not the leaking roof
Nor the singing mosquitoes
In the damp, wretched cell
It is not the clank of the key
As the warden locks you in
It is not the measly rations
Unfit for beast or man
Nor yet the emptiness of day
Dipping into the blankness of night
It is not
It is not
It is not

It is the lies that have been drummed
Into your ears for a generation
It is the security agent running amok
Executing callous calamitous orders
In exchange for a wretched meal a day
The magistrate writing into her book
A punishment she knows is undeserved
The moral decrepitude
The mental ineptitude
The meat of dictators
Cowardice masking as obedience
Lurking in our denigrated souls
It is fear damping trousers

That we dare not wash
It is this
It is this
It is this
Dear friend, turns our free world
Into a dreary prison

 

©2026 Bas Bleu