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

 

 

Be grateful for whatever comes

I confess that it’s often easier for me to crumple under the cumulative weight of what’s going on in the world than it is to be brave and positive. That’s why it was important for me to take part in No Kings protests—even though I be a solitary being, when I joined with hundreds and thousands and millions, I added to the strength. So I am grateful for every reminder that little voices add up to a roar and that there is light in the darkness when we look for it.

For today’s Gratitude Monday in National Poetry Month, let’s have something from the 13^th Century Persian poet we know as Rumi. (Today's Iran, Persia.) “The Guest House” is very frequently quoted during mindfulness retreats, so it seems appropriate for today. It reminds us to invite into our lives and souls dark things as well as light, because everything—every thing—has something to teach us. And—I hope—to make us stronger for the necessary.

“The Guest House”

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

Without a hint of guardian leaf

For Easter Sunday in National Poetry Month, let’s have something from the Harlem Renaissance. Festus Claudius McKay was born in Jamaica in 1889. He came to the USA to study at the Tuskegee Institute in 1912 but quickly moved on to Kansas State University. The racism he encountered in this country shocked him. In 1919 he traveled to the UK, where he was active in socialist circles. He returned to the US two years later and wrote for various progressive publications. From 1923 to 1934 decade he traveled and worked around Europe, North Africa and the Soviet Union. When he returned to the States, he settled in Harlem.

A relentless atheist for most of his life, McKay fell out of love with communism (although remaining a social activist and anti-racist) and converted to Roman Catholicism. His writings—novels, poems and other pieces—reflect his experiences as a bisexual Black immigrant man in a nation that was (and still is) afraid of most of those descriptors.

Today’s poem is from 1922, published in his Harlem Shadows, so it predates his conversion by a couple of decades. But you can see that, even as an atheist, McKay was swayed by thoughts of the resurrection.

“The Easter Flower”

Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly
My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,
Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily
Soft-scented in the air for yards around;

Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!
Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,
It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief
In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;

And many thought it was a sacred sign,
And some called it the resurrection flower;
And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine,
Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.

For my Easter flower, I give you a dogwood blossom. Not, technically a flower, but a bract; the cruciform bloom is sometimes seen as a symbol for the cross, and thus a precursor to the Resurrection.

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Give back your heart

Our poet for today, Derek Walcott, was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, and raised by a widowed mother as a Methodist in a Catholic-dominated culture. His first published poem, at age 14, elicited a condemnation as blasphemous from a Catholic priest. He studied in Kingston, Jamaica, and then moved to Trinidad, becoming a critic, teacher and journalist. A job teaching at Boston University brought him to the United States, where he won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the “genius grant”); he also received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.

In “Love after Love”, he references spirituality (especially in the second stanza), but I’ve included it in this month’s collection because the poet advises us to create within ourselves, each of us, the building blocks of strength that will form the foundation of resistance. He may be speaking of recovery from a love affair, but he could also be speaking of learning to love oneself, without which there can be no love of other, or love of principle.

(In fact—when you think about it, those who claim to love principle without that underlying sense of care for self, are pretty much the ones who take us all down. They substitute the abstract for the particular and have no empathy at all. Empathy, they tell us, is a weakness, and we must extirpate it. It’s a bleak world they envision as prison for us all.)

"Love after Love"

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

The sun refused to shine

Today is Good Friday for Western Christians—commemorating the death on the cross of Jesus Christ. It is one of the most sacred days of the calendar, a time for reflection on the sacrifice made to wash away the sins of mankind.

So I don’t know what blasphemy the Kleptocrat will be committing, but I imagine he might revive hawking his “God Bless the USA” Bibles at $59.99 a pop (plush S&H). That was his contribution to the season two years ago, thus bringing the practice of simony into the 21^st Century.

This is a guy who cannot quote a single Bible verse; who only appears in churches for campaign photo opportunities and funerals, because services conflict with his own worship, on the golf course. (Although, okay, he has broken most of the Ten Commandments.) So it is seriously cherce to watch the video in which he proclaims multiple times that the Bible is his favorite book and that “religion and Christianity” are what’s missing from this country. (It’s still out there, but I’m not linking to it. It may even be on the White House site.)

This was a day after he wished everyone “Happy Holy Week,” and .shared something allegedly sent to him comparing his travails to the sufferings of Christ during this time. (People all over the Socials offered to give him a chance: die on the cross (or, TBH, just die) and if he rises after three days, okay. I myself would appoint multiple monitors to watch over him for the three days, sticking pins into random places every few minutes before I'd accept that he had actually died. This is not personal, I wanted to do it for Kenny Lay when he evaded prison for his Enron crimes by allegedly dying.)

Anyway, since the crucifixion of Good Friday is the setup for the resurrection of Easter, today we’re having the old spiritual “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord.” I can think of no one better to sing it than Mahalia Jackson.

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Not only the absence of war

Given the current climate of cut-price jackboots marching over education, scientific advancement, human decency and the arts (among other elements that mark a civilized society), we need to hunker down around things like the Pythagorean Theorem, Baroque polyphony, the Oxford comma debate, Expressionism and, yes, poetry, as a way to keep bright the fires of sanity, grace and compassion.

So let’s think of National Poetry Month this year as a necessary component of the spirit of resistance, persistence and perhaps a few victories over ignorance, fear, greed and buffoonery.

To get us going, then, let’s have a poem from British-born Denise Levertov. Levertov was the daughter of a Hasidic Jew who left Russian Poland (Poland having been part of Russia until 1918) after World War I and emigrated to England, where he became an Anglican priest. The entire family campaigned for human rights, which on its own would have kept her from being allowed into the United States under the current administration, but she came here in 1947, so she spent most of her career as an American.

Levertov was one of many writers and artists who spoke out against the Vietnam War. She was among those who did more than just speak out—she withheld tax payments, and she was one of the founders of the group RESIST, a philanthropic non-profit that funds grass-roots activist organizations. RESIST was created in 1967 in response to the anti-war proclamation, “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority”.

So let’s start out the month with something appropriately titled.

“Making Peace”

A voice from the dark called out,
             ‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
                                   But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
                                       A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
                                              A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
                        A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

The wise, the godless, the simple-minded and the child

Well, here we are in April, which means National Poetry Month. Which means 30 days of poems right here.

We’re also in the second April of the second administration of the Kleptocrat, and I’m struggling—along with millions of others who have been hurt materially, psychologically and spiritually by this criminal and his toadies. I feel a little like ever yoga lesson, when my instructor asks me if I have a Plough pose in me for that day: we’ll see.

But today, Pesach begins at sundown. Pesach is the celebration of that time when the Angel of Death passed by Jewish households when it spread calamity across Egypt. It also marks the joyful but speedy exit of the Jews from their captivity; in too much of a hurry to let bread rise. Ergo matzoh.

Pesach is a time for huge family gatherings around the table, recounting the whole Exodus story, eating (but nothing leavened) and drinking, talking and singing. Essentially, giving thanks for release from slavery, for escape from plagues, for the grace of God. It’s kind of the Ur-Gratitude celebration, and it lasts for eight days (seven if you’re in some Reform congregations). The meal follows a script set down centuries ago for both the menu and the conversation.

The Angel of Death has frankly been working overtime in the Middle East this year, aided by the forces of the United States and Israel. (I don’t know how this works, but the Angel might better serve humanity by visiting a residence on Pennsylvania Avenue.) Klepto and his cronies are openly talking about war crimes, and inviting/threatening our former allies (80 years right down the tubes!) to join in, because he’s made a mess and needs other people to clean it up for him. As always.

But they’re basically backing away while the Gulf States "privately" urge him to be their catspaw. As long as they keep flinging him flattery and flashy trinkets, I guess we’ll do that.

Well, back to Pesach. I definitely get behind having a ritual meal with roots more than 2000 years old, where traditions flow seamlessly into the new generation along with matzoh ball soup, brisket and charoset. Elijah will find many empty chairs to choose from at Seder tables tonight. But that will not stop the remembrance and the gratitude.

So today my entry for National Poetry Month is a poem about this holiday by one of my all-time favorite writers, Primo Levi. The second line is highly appropriate.

“Passover”

Tell me: how is this night different, from all other nights?
How, tell me, is this Passover, different from other Passovers?
Light the lamp, open the door wide, so the pilgrim can come in,
Gentile or Jew; under the rags perhaps the prophet is concealed.
Let him enter and sit down with us; let him listen, drink, sing and celebrate Passover;
Let him consume the bread of affliction, the Paschal Lamb, sweet mortar and bitter herbs.
This is the night of differences, in which you lean your elbow on the table,
Since the forbidden becomes prescribed, evil is translated into good.
We will spend the night recounting, far-off events full of wonder,
And because of all the wine, the mountains will skip like rams.
Tonight they exchange questions: the wise, the godless, the simple-minded and the child.
And time reverses its course, today flowing back into yesterday,
Like a river enclosed at its mouth. Each of us has been a slave in Egypt,
Soaked straw and clay with sweat, and crossed the sea dry-footed.
You too, stranger. this year in fear and shame,
Next year in virtue and in justice.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Milk money

Back in the Before Times, it didn’t matter where I bought milk for my lattes; it was $1.99 per half gallon. So I bought it wherever I happened to be shopping when I ran low—mostly either Trader Joe or Wegmans.

Then, maybe two years ago, I noticed that Wegmans had raised the price to $2.69—okay, but TJ was $2.49. Why was that, I wondered. I checked Giant (a regional biggie); they were charging $2.79. What the hell? The milk basically comes from the same cows.

So I limited my milk purchases to TJ. Annoying because it meant in some weeks going to multiple stores to complete my grocery shopping, but I found this discrepancy annoying.

Then, in the past couple of months, I went to a Lidl for the first time. Just for ducks, I checked their milk price: $1.63. This made me feel like the other concerns—especially Giant—were just taking the piss. (It may be a loss leader for Lidl, but more than a dollar delta between them and the next cheapest price seems pretty bold.)

What with tariffs and war in Iran, this past week, they raised their price to $1.67.

Here’s Trader Joe:

And Wegmans:

But looky here at Giant:

I mean—Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

 

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Gratitude Monday: A little light protest

Me and 7,999,999 of my closest friends turned out on Saturday at more than 3300 locations across the country to reiterate our refusal to submit to the Kleptocrat’s attempts to become king-dictator. Additionally, thousands more showed up in cities and towns around the world to stand with us.

He didn’t hear us, because he was in Florida golfing and grifting, but Republicans in general did. They are getting nervous. I hope this develops into ulcers.

This time round I did not get any photos of my fellow protesters in The People’s Republic. Given the rotting that’s taken place in the Kleptocrat’s brain since the last No Kings in October, I added a new message to the back of the poster I made before:

I know it’s a pipe dream; the toadies and lickspittles in the Cabinet will never invoke the 25^th Amendment, no matter now much he drools, slurs and meanders. But it’s still worth reminding Republicans that we know what’s going on.

Ran into my neighbor again. He carried several signs with his political cartoons, and saw some other protestors across the parkway who also had them. Viz:

At one point, when people were changing call-and-response “Tell me what democracy looks like/This is what democracy looks like,” he commented, “If this is what democracy looks like, it’s aging.” Well, yes—there were a lot of people who looked like they might have marched in the 70s, and 2010, and 2017. But there were also many youngs, including families with small children and dogs.

The passing motorists also showed support, honking and waving American flags. Some even had their own No Kings signs against the windows. (There was that one jackass in an SUV who flashed thumbs down; there’s always that one jackass.)

Fairfax County’s finest were out in force as well—one of their SUVs (why are they all in SUVs?) parked on the median and at one time four more hovering in an adjacent parking lot, I suppose to ensure that the people carrying signs didn’t suddenly pull out assault rifles or something. It would have been a good time to knock over an ABC store, what with half the force on riot control duty.

On the whole, a good way to spend 90 minutes being counted as opposed to this administration and every criminal, corrupt, contaminated thing it does. And it’s my gratitude for today.

 

 

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Bring me something I can use

Whee, doggies—another whirlwind week in global geopolitics, brought to us by the worst, dumbest, most corrupt and incompetent administration in US history. Just a few highlights:

The kind of messaging you never want to see regarding any war (much less an illegal war of aggression) from the brain-rotted asshole driving the show:

Then we find out that said asshole—the one whose Daily Presidential Briefing on intelligence has been reduced to three bullet points in crayon accompanied by some swell GIFs—can’t take anything more complicated by way of reports on the war from the military chiefs than a two-minute video compilation of (as one aide described it) “things going boom”. He only wants to see “successful” operations before he gets his little container of pudding.

And finally, House Republicans announced on Wednesday that they’ve created an “America First” prize, and the first recipient is…the asshole who still doesn’t have a Nobel Peace Prize. I am unable to find any images, but it is indubitably gold-plated. Possibly in the form of a calf. It may be that Republican ladies have contributed their gold jewelry to be melted down for the purpose.

Seriously—this timeline sucks.

So our earworm for today is “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News”, from The Wiz. It just has to be.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu