At least half terrible

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.

The thing about “Good Bones” is: Smith is pellucidly clear about the realities of the world (and most likely accurate, although that 50 percent number is a hard pill for me to swallow). And yet she ends it on a solid positive.

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.

 ©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Carry our sorrows

The darkest day in the Christian calendar—Good Friday—paves the way for the most transcendently glorious one—Easter. You can’t have a resurrection without a death, and the death of Jesus of Nazareth was a ghastly one:

It started with his anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane; Luke tells us that while praying, Jesus sweated blood. This is actually a thing, hematidrosis, documented in patients who are in severe anxiety triggered by fear. One of its effects is weakening the skin. In the case of Jesus, it would have rendered him more likely to lose blood during flogging, wearing the crown of thorns and other elements of his execution.

The flogging itself not infrequently killed people: a scourge comprises multiple braided leather thongs with metal or stone balls woven into them and a hook at the end of each. The former tenderizes the victim, often breaking bones; the latter rips their flesh. Covering Jesus with the purple robe and then ripping it off again would have opened his wounds, causing more blood loss and sending him into hypovolemic shock. This latter could have caused pericarditis (inflammation of the sac around the heart) and brought more sharp pain.

Then we get to the actual crucifixion, which in itself was a brutal method of execution. Arms outstretched to the side, with hands nailed to the cross-beam, then knees bent and each foot nailed to the upright. This makes breathing excruciating. We are told that Jesus’ death came relatively quickly—three to six hours—probably as a result of his weakened systems.

Modern medical investigators believe that he died of cardiac and respiratory shock, and they put paid to the notion that he merely fainted and was taken down from the cross alive, thus rendering the resurrection a hoax. (There's only one documented case of someone surviving a Roman crucifixion; it's from Flavius Josephus, about 70 years after the death of Christ. In that case, the person was taken down from the cross still visibly alive, and then treated for days before being pronounced "survived". Two others were taken down alive, but were too far gone to benefit from medical treatment.)

I’m leaving out all the reality that—had Jesus undergone everything documented (and known to be a part of Roman judicial punishments) but somehow fooled his (professional) executioners before death, he would still have been in no condition to appear three days later, with scars of wounds but otherwise ticketyboo and feeling a bit peckish; not to mention being described as “conquering death”. It would have taken weeks of care to get him upright after that ordeal, which the Son of Man experienced in every excruciating detail.

Well, but as the Christ was on the cross, bleeding out and gasping for a breath, he also carried the weight of human sins, which was why he was born in a stable 33 years before. So our National Poetry Month entry today comes from the Easter portion of Handel’s Messiah. Based on a passage from Isaiah (my favorite Old Testament book), the chorus “Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs” sums up the day and gives us hope. Here's the Royal Choral Society performing it.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Somewhere in the field

Today’s poem takes us to the heart of what’s happening under the current administration’s policies denying humanity to The Other—the black, the brown, the yellow, the red. Especially the psycthotic break towards Latinos: the rich, old, white Republicans somehow want all the donkey work (bussing restaurant tables and washing dishes; building additions to houses; landscaping and maintaining yards; cleaning office buildings; harvesting crops) done for less-than-living wages, and without importing laborers. It’s a weird economic viewpoint.

They demonize those who do this work, call them leeches on society, paint them with the “rapists and murderers” brush, and yet essentially give the individuals and businesses that hire them a bonus for maximizing their cost savings. (Along with, by the way, avoiding contributing taxes into the system, with their under-the-table cash payments to the laborers.)

With a quota of deporting one million immigrants in 2025, this administration’s ICE thugs are roaming through the cities and agricultural areas, “detaining” anyone who looks like he might be “suspect”—which is to say, someone whose first language was not English, whose skin has an excess of melanin and who probably doesn’t have immediate access to a lawyer. Well—lawyer is kind of a dream these days; they’re being hauled in, poured onto planes and dumped in a hard labor prison in El Salvador without the due process that the Constitution guarantees them. The events of the past week—acknowledging that Maryland resident with legal status Kilmar Abrego García was “mistakenly” rounded up and deported to El Salvador, but refusing court orders to return him—are the nadir of despicable actions…so far.

So, let’s have a view from the worker side. Blas Manuel de Luna was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and worked alongside his parents, brothers and sisters in the agricultural fields of California’s San Juaquin Valley (whence comes a cornucopia of produce that goes out to the nation and the world). 

If farmers had to pay workers a living wage, we’ve been told for at least a hundred years, they couldn’t afford to stay in business. So, every salad we toss, every handful of almonds or walnuts we snack on, every cherry, peach, tomato and other summer pleasure we savor comes off the backs of men, women and children who work double-digit hours per day for heartbreakingly low amounts of money, under the ever-present threat of visits from La Migra if they complain about anything.

Even decades after the dedicated work of César Chávez, neither conditions nor pay has improved much for these workers, as de Luna well knows. He managed to leave the fields physically, earning degrees in English from Cal State Fresno, and an MFA from the University of Washington, but they’ve stayed with him. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin for a while, but now teaches English at a high school in California. I don’t expect “Bent to the Earth” really needs much of an introduction. But consider its truths when you consume anything that was produced by campesinos in the fields or obreros in the cities, and as you watch the ongoing constitutional crisis over Abrego García.

“Bent to the Earth”

They had hit Ruben
with the high beams, had blinded
him so that the van
he was driving, full of Mexicans
going to pick tomatoes,
would have to stop. Ruben spun

the van into an irrigation ditch,
spun the five-year-old me awake
to immigration officers,
their batons already out,
already looking for the soft spots on the body,
to my mother being handcuffed
and dragged to a van, to my father
trying to show them our green cards.

They let us go. But Alvaro
was going back.
So was his brother Fernando.
So was their sister Sonia. Their mother
did not escape,
and so was going back. Their father
was somewhere in the field,
and was free. There were no great truths

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

The peace of my years

Prior to 20 January 2017, when most people heard the word “resistance”, they probably thought “Résistance”—as in Victor Laszlo, le Maquis, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the like. So let’s have a poem today that harkens back to the big-R Resistance. The repressive regime this time around is no less dangerous than the last bout of Nazis, so seems appropriate.

When you wage war, uniformed armies with big guns are only one of your strategic components. Gathering intelligence and committing acts of sabotage are both necessary and dangerous activities, and communicating securely with your agents behind enemy lines is critical to success in both these endeavors. It’s kind of a given that if you can encrypt something, someone else can decrypt it, particularly if the cipher key you use is based on a work that’s public knowledge. Viz.: a Shakespearean sonnet or the second paragraph of page 47 of Newton’s Principia.

Leo Marks ran the cryptographer unit for Britain’s Special Operations Executive, the organization that was created at the behest of Winston Churchill for the express purpose to “set Europe ablaze”. SOE's work was vital to winning the war; there were staggering blunders, but on the whole their agents gathered valuable information that helped shape (amongst others) Operation Overlord, the invasion of France that began with D-Day.  

(BTW, as it happens, Heydrich's assassination was carried out by SOE-trained Czechs and Slovaks, in May 1942, four months after the Wannsee Conference at which the plan for the destruction of all European Jews was laid out. There's no telling how many lives that one act saved, but it did not come without cost. In addition to the assassins, more than 1300 men, women and children were murdered in reprisals.) 

Marks was the son of the co-owner of the Marks & Co. antiquarian bookshop that was featured in 84 Charing Cross Road. His interest in cryptography came at an early age when he read Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Gold Bug”. Upon being conscripted in 1942, Marks’ deciphering abilities caused him to be diverted from Bletchley Park; instead he was sent to SOE headquarters in Baker Street to devise ciphers, build out teams of cryptanalysts and train field agents. His innate curiosity and creativity, combined with a certain amount of smart-assery, led him to a number of innovations. Among them was the insight around the insecurity of any cipher based on a “public” key, so he wrote poems for his agents to memorize as keys for encrypting and decrypting messages. “The Life that I Have” was one such, actually written at Christmas 1943 about his girlfriend, who had recently died. He gave this one to Violet Szabo, the Franco-British woman who was captured on her second mission to Occupied France, tortured and executed at Ravensbrück in 1945.

(It’s interesting to note that—being enemies not only of science but also of the humanities, the RWNJ crowd are somewhat hampered in things of this nature. Oh, yeah—the techbros of Thiel, Musk et al. can run algorithms, and blah, blah, blah. But anything their AI can cook up, our AI can uncook.)

This poem reminds us of the cost of redeeming nations from oppression.

“The Life that I Have”

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours.
The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

and if you can't

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

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

All this juice and all this joy

This past week I reread Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Published in 1911, it’s a children’s story about two spoiled, disagreeable, unloved, sickly, privileged English cousins (a boy and a girl) who are transformed by the power of nature in a hidden garden on a Yorkshire estate. (Burnett was a prolific author of fiction for both adults and kids; her initial foray into the latter market was Little Lord Fauntleroy.) They’re helped by a local peasant lad and a curmudgeonly old gardener; oh, and there's a robin. Essentially, in reviving a walled-off, unloved (in fact—actively hated), neglected garden, they are restored to humanity.

To be precise, what I read is The Annotated Secret Garden. A good deal of the annotations analyze the literary allusions (which—I dunno; does using the word “wuthering” to indicate Yorkshire winds always mean a writer is specifically linking to Wuthering Heights?) and point out religious and spiritual metaphors. (Which, again—okay.) But Burnett does set preponderance of the story during Spring, when the seemingly lifeless moors are at first a dismal and alien landscape for the girl brought from India when her parents die, but she comes to appreciate it through her interaction with both the local lad and working in the garden. She sees things growing from little green spikes poking out of the earth to brilliantly colored daffodils, columbine and lilies.

And here's the thing: there’s just something about the beauty and resilience of plants that restores your equilibrium. Despite the best efforts of humans to destroy it with war, pollution, urban sprawl and just plain arrogant destruction, nature does her best to resist and persist, showing us every Spring that she’ll take whatever bit is available—even if it’s just a weak place in concrete—to push up life.

So today, in grateful recognition of the recuperative power of gardens (whether designed by mortals or immortals), I’ll share a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my favorite poets. Convert to Catholicism, Jesuit priest, exceptional poet of any age.

In the past you’ve had some of his sonnets for Easter, and his “Pied Beauty”, which takes delight in the parti-colored elements of nature. But for Gratitude Monday today, here’s “Spring”.

“Spring”

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         
   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         
   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush         
   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.         

What is all this juice and all this joy?         
   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,         
   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,         
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,         
   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.      

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Tiny suns in vipers' eyes

Like the Jews, the Chinese know from playing the long game. As a culture, they measure time in terms of centuries and are willing to plant seeds they know they’ll never see grow to fullness, content with the understanding that their children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren will taste the fruit.

This means that individuals, communities, whole generations have lived hard lives under successive repressive regimes, but the civilization keeps moving forward.

And their poets understand that if you want to transmit a message, you use language in a way that encodes it. Those not in the know won’t be able break the code, but it’ll reach those who have the key; they’ll be able to decipher it.

Contemporary poet Bei Dao (nom de plume of Zhao Zhenkai) has said that “Each language keeps the secret code of a culture.” Even though China has a unifying written language, “the local accent keeps their secret, keeps their code.” And that’s how poets, especially the group known as the Misty Poets, who resisted the repression of the Cultural Revolution, protested.

As a teenager, Bei Dao was a member of the Red Guards, but as he began to withdraw from pro-Mao activities, he was “re-educated” as a construction worker. But no amount of re-education could suppress his poems.

“The Answer” is one of Bei Dao’s most famous works. It was written in response to the 1976 Tiananmen demonstrations and became a focal point of the pro-democracy movement. It was featured on posters during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Bei Dao was out of the country at the time of this second suppression and he has worked in exile ever since. (He did not return to China until 2006.) You can see how it might get up the noses of the Party elite.

“The Answer”

Debasement is the password of the base,
Nobility the epitaph of the noble.
See how the gilded sky is covered
With the drifting twisted shadows of the dead.

The Ice Age is over now,
Why is there ice everywhere?
The Cape of Good Hope has been discovered,
Why do a thousand sails contest the Dead Sea?

I came into this world
Bringing only paper, rope, a shadow,
To proclaim before the judgment
The voice that has been judged:

Let me tell you, world,
I—do—not—believe!
If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet,
Count me as number thousand and one.

I don't believe the sky is blue;
I don't believe in thunder's echoes;
I don't believe that dreams are false;
I don't believe that death has no revenge.

If the sea is destined to breach the dikes
Let all the brackish water pour into my heart;
If the land is destined to rise
Let humanity choose a peak for existence again.

A new conjunction and glimmering stars
Adorn the unobstructed sky now;
They are the pictographs from five thousand years.
They are the watchful eyes of future generations.

But I find “Accomplices” to be perhaps more applicable in this time of our own cultural revolution. Bei Dao reminds us that freedom lies somewhere between the hunter and the hunted, that it is a 24x7 effort to maintain it. It’s not just those who actively suck up, either out of opportunism or fear, who are collaborators. We who do not resist are accomplices.

“Accomplices”

After all those years
mica glints in the mud,
evil as it is bright,
tiny suns in vipers' eyes.

Branch roads appear and disappear
in the hands of trees.
Where did that fawn go?
Only cemeteries could assuage
this desolation, like tiny cities.

Freedom is only the distance
between the hunter and his prey.
As we turn to look,
a bat describes a sweeping arc
across the vast canvas of our inheritance
and vanishes into the dusk.

Nor are we free of guilt.
Long since, in history's mirror,
we became accomplices,
awaiting the day we might
seep down through the layers of stone
into subterranean pools
to contemplate darkness again.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Cry out warning and shatter illusions

Tonight marks the beginning of Pesach, when Jews celebrate the liberation of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery. The story goes that when the Angel of Death passed through the land to kill the first-born sons, he passed over the houses that had been marked with lambs’ blood on the lintels—i.e., those of the Jews. Their children were saved, the Egyptians’ were not. Including Pharaoh’s eldest son.

The cumulative toll of various plagues prompted Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go. They were understandably in so much of a hurry to shake the dust of Egypt from their heels, they didn’t bother to wait for the bread to rise; they just upped sticks and headed for Israel.

If we’re going to talk resistance, persistence and resilience, the ne plus ultra of those qualities has to be the Jewish people. A lot of folks—evangelicals among them—focus on the Biblical suffering: Nebuchadnezzar, Goliath, Pharaoh, Caesar. After that they get pretty fuzzy. Many among them are Holocaust deniers; many others only focus on modern-day Israel as a component of the End Times. And they sure as hell don’t want actual Jews living anywhere near them. (They don’t even want me living near them.)

Plus—I remember a time when Catholics referred to Jews as Christ-killers, and every year on Palm Sunday the mass includes the congregation taking the part of the Hebrews before Pilate and yelling, “Crucify him!” several times. It was only 14 years ago that Pope Benedict XVI exonerated the Jews from this alleged crime, and there was a lot of pushback on it from the faithful.

All of this, of course, is before we even get to the Holocaust.

(I am distinguishing between the Jewish people and the government of Israel here, because I am frankly aghast at Israelis making mass murder in Gaza—nearly 70,000 killed since October 2023—policy. Netanyahu belongs in the dock at The Hague (he’s already been indicted). But then so does the Kleptocrat and his ilk.)

Okay, let’s have a couple of poems of resilience from Jews, starting with Psalm 142 (KJV):

I cried unto the Lord with my voice; with my voice unto the Lord did I make my supplication.

² I poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my trouble.

³ When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then thou knewest my path. In the way wherein I walked have they privily laid a snare for me.

⁴ I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me: refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul.

⁵ I cried unto thee, O Lord: I said, Thou art my refuge and my portion in the land of the living.

⁶ Attend unto my cry; for I am brought very low: deliver me from my persecutors; for they are stronger than I.

⁷ Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name: the righteous shall compass me about; for thou shalt deal bountifully with me.

For something more recent, let’s turn to the Hungarian Miklós Radnóti, considered one of the premiere Holocaust poets. Today we’re having “Postcard 1”, in which we are reminded of what inspires people to persevere in the face of the uttermost cruelty. Victor Frankl spoke about this at length in Man’s Search for Meaning; those around him in Auschwitz who found something worth living for—a loved one, a focus of study, a hope for the future—all things being roughly equal, those people survived. Those who lost hope died.

“Postcard 1”

Out of Bulgaria, the great wild roar of the artillery thunders,
resounds on the mountain ridges, rebounds, then ebbs into silence
while here men, beasts, wagons and imagination all steadily increase;
the road whinnies and bucks, neighing; the maned sky gallops;
and you are eternally with me, love, constant amid all the chaos,
glowing within my conscience — incandescent, intense.
Somewhere within me, dear, you abide forever —
still, motionless, mute, like an angel stunned to silence by death
or a beetle hiding in the heart of a rotting tree.

And finally, here’s a reminder of what constitutes resistance—it is not always taking up arms or marching in streets. It is a mindset of refusing to believe the false narrative of propaganda no matter how many times or how loudly it is repeated. It is an individual act of kindness or generosity, multiplied by tens of thousands of kindnesses and generosities. It is obstructing the oppressors at every possible turn. It is amassing a repository of evidence to everything that’s done and said. It is never surrendering.

Haim Gouri is an Israeli journalist, poet and film documentarian. Monia Avrahami was general director of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in Israel, and collaborated with Gouri on the film Flames in the Ashes, in which this poem appeared. Avrahami died in 2014, Gouri in 2018.

“Resistance is…”

To smuggle a loaf of bread - was to resist.
To teach in secret - was to resist.
To gather information and distribute an underground newsletter - was to resist.
To cry out warning and shatter illusions - was to resist.
To rescue a Torah scroll - was to resist.
To forge documents - was to resist.
To smuggle people across borders - was to resist.
To chronicle events and conceal the records - was to resist.
To extend a helping hand to those in need - was to resist.
To dare to speak out, at the risk of one's life  - was to resist. 
To stand empty-handed against the killers - was to resist. 
To reach the besieged, smuggling weapons and commands - was to resist.
To take up arms in streets, mountains and forests - was to resist.
To rebel in the death camps - was to resist.
To rise up in the ghettos, amid tumbling walls,
in the most desperate revolt humanity has ever known ...

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

Somebody to lean on

Although I am a military historian concentrating on the mass conflicts of the 20^th Century, it’s occurred to me recently that everything I know about resistance movements (specifically those in Nazi-occupied Europe) starts when they were already operational. I don’t know spit about how the various networks were formed; how people who’d had their country invaded, their lives turned upside down and their economies shattered shifted from thinking like law-abiding citizens of a reasonable (ish) government to thinking like clandestine law-breaking rebels who needed to build networks of people they could trust who also had the skills to do the necessary—like print and distribute pamphlets, finance covert operations, amass and use a variety of weapons and all the rest of it.

Resistance cells do not spring fully-formed and armed from the brow of a god, and there was no YouTube back in the 1940s to show you how to plant explosives on the struts of a railroad bridge or set up a radio receiver in your back bedroom. (Or where to find or manufacture the explosives or build a receiver.)

And when you’re living in an authoritarian state, you have to sneak everything you do that could be considered subversive. How do you know that your neighbor Dave is really trustworthy, in the engaging-in-illegal-activities-for-the-good-of-the-country sense of the term? How much are you willing to bet that Dave’s wife won’t inform on you, or get Dave to do it, because she’s terrified that your activities can place her entire family in serious danger? Where can you meet without being seen or overheard, in a region where more than two people having a conversation is suspect? How do you go about forging documents if you’re actually a shopkeeper? Which of your acquaintances have the strength of character and quick-wittedness to push anti-propaganda fliers through mail slots and talk German patrols out of looking in their bicycle basket that’s full of fliers?

And—once you’ve got that cell sorted, how do you connect securely to other groups trying to do the same thing in other villages and towns?

(Interestingly, in the WWII scenario, communists had the advantage in this respect: they already had their cells and networks set up, they had communication capability and they weren’t strangers to organized violence. As long as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was in force, they stood down, but after 22 June 1941, they hit the ground running. The problem was integrating their activities with those of resistance units of other political persuasions, and that’s another issue we face: uniting in a community of noncompliance when there are so many passionate opinions about what should be prioritized.)

The thing about authoritarian regimes is they’re built on terror. The current US administration is no different. For White people, we’re at the intimidation stage. Only this week, the Kleptocrat issued EOs directing his Bimbo General Pam Bondi to “investigate” Chris Krebs, head of CISA during the first term, and Miles Taylor, chief of staff at DHS during same. (The investigations extend to anyone who’s worked with Taylor and Krebs, so—colleagues, companies, possibly even their old fraternity brothers.) Their crimes? Krebs certified that the 2020 election was secure and therefore accurate; Taylor wrote an anonymous NYT op-ed in 2018 criticizing the legality of the policies the president wanted to implement. We are waist-deep in retribution and revenge, and it’s not even three months since inauguration. People who are not White are definitely in the fear and even terror stages. 

Intimidation, fear and terror militate against speaking out, standing out, attracting attention. So the challenge is the same as it was in 1940: building a secure community of trust aligned against the very loud, very bellicose oppressors. Creating a center of mass that counters the mechanisms of structural power and gathering numbers and momentum. It starts, necessarily, one by one.

All that being said, our National Poetry Month entry today is “Lean on Me”, by Bill Withers. Here are Stevie Wonder and John Legend, honoring Withers at his induction into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame in 2015.

Volume up.

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Hold fast

Hope is integral to every resistance movement. You have to believe there’s something better out there, and that it’s achievable, in order to put everything on the line.

That means you have to actively disbelieve the propaganda that’s shat all over you on the daily by the oppressor’s firehose of lies. No, the Kleptocrat is not an economic (or any other) genius; no, heaving a chainsaw and a pack of brochachos at the federal government will not improve anything; no, Canada does not have a gigantic water faucet that we can call on whenever; no, that was not a fucking touristic “day of love” at the Capitol on J6.

Sadly, there are way too many people in this country incapable of doing that even a little.

But for the rest of us, we can start with hope.

And that’s where poets like Langston Hughes can help us. In just a few lines, he’s able to place that small, glowing star in our hands, and open our hearts to the power of dreams, and the devastation that comes when we don’t have them.

“Dreams”

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

I cover all

It seems appropriate that somebody should mark the 160^th Anniversary of the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. I look around me at the media and I see nothing—I mean to say, bupkis—so I guess that somebody is me.

Perhaps the DOGiE brochachos/Proud Boys/Three Percenters crowd are deep in denial about the event. And perhaps that’s because not only did it represent the final loss of the Army of Northern Virginia and a big win by the Army of the Potomac, but because after Lee surrendered, so did every other Confederate general across the country.

It ended the War Between the States, and the Confederacy absolutely, positively, unquestionably lost. And this is something the White Christian nationalist lot really does not like to acknowledge.

Not for nothing are they called the Lost Cause. (Hint: because they lost.)

The pity is that Abraham Lincoln let the 11 Confederate states back into the Union without some kind of thorough de-Nazification process. Well—okay, not his fault, really, him having been assassinated six days after the Appomattox surrender by one of those sore loser Lost Causers. And yes—Congress did pass the Fourteenth Amendment, which does provide for banning insurrectionists from serving in elected federal office, but that doesn’t appear to have stuck; viz: the current occupant of the White House, several Senators and a whole flock of Representatives.

(The Fourteenth also guarantees birthright citizenship, which the insurrectionists are currently riding over in APCs. It appears that it’s one thing to pass laws and an entirely different thing to follow and enforce them. The Constitution these days being more of a guideline or a suggestion than the actual foundation of our civil society.)

So it turns out that that war didn’t actually end 160 years ago, or at least that the ideals of the Confederates—White, male supremacy floating on a completely unsustainable economy--have re-emerged in recent years like zombies. SECDEF Pete Hegseth (who might possibly be able to drink more than Grant, although I'm betting the latter would be able to get up from the table while Petey would be under it) is busy texting war plans to random reporters and renaming military bases after Confederate (losing) generals. They're also rewriting history to blot out things like slavery and anyone non-White who accomplished anything. Ergo silence on this anniversary. So we have to do it all over again, somehow.

In the meantime, for our National Poetry Month entry I’m giving you Twentieth Century American poet Carl Sandburg’s take on the endgame of all wars. Happy 160^th, y’all!

“The Grass”

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
                                          I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

                                          What place is this?
                                          Where are we now?

                                          I am the grass.
                                          Let me work.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Once more you will grant me strength

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.

I think that we can draw inspiration from the poets—and especially the female poets—of Iran. They’ve had decades of experience using those weapons to lay bare the corruption and the tyranny of their government. They’ve had to be subtle and clever about it to evade the surveillance state. This is something that we are discovering we need to do in a time when the president of the United States uses the mechanism of government to oppress, suppress and repress anyone who doesn’t plant their lips firmly on his orange arse.

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.:

“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.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

So cunning and so cold

I vowed not to look at my 401(k) account for at least the first six months of this year. I knew that it wouldn’t make me feel better, and also that there’s not much I can do about it except ride it out. At the end of last year, I asked my financial adviser whether I’d be okay through 25% tariffs coupled with a 2008-like market drop; he said I would be (and showed me the receipts), so that’s what I’m going with.

(I did, however, go to Wegmans last Tuesday, to use my $15-off-purchase-of-$75-or-more coupon on wine before the tariffs hit. Just in case.)

Even so, when the Kleptocrat announced them before an audience of barking seals on Wednesday, they exceeded all expectations for arbitrariness and idiocy. There’s no doubt in my mind that nations who’ve pissed him off (or just not extolled him to the degree to which he thinks he’s entitled) got higher tariffs, just because he’s president of the United States and he can do it. (Certainly he can as long as Congress rolls over and plays dead; which they are.) Or maybe he does not find their national flag esthetically appealing. Or he has it in mind that they’re a “shithole” country.

We all noticed, for instance, that Russia was not on the list. For the time being, the poodle isn’t going to bite its master.

But it did strike as strange everyone with three synapses firing in sequence that two “nations”—Heard Island and McDonald Islands—got hit with 10% tariffs, despite the fact that they are very small islands off the coast of Antarctica, with no human inhabitants. Yes—Stable Genius is showing penguins (and a few seals) who’s boss around here. He fer dang sure is.

But today is Gratitude Monday, and it’s also National Poetry Month. So my thanks goes to Janel Comeau, whom I follow on Bluesky. On Friday she [ta]riffed on the William Carlos Williams poem, “This Is Just to Say”, with absolute perfection. Viz:

We are talking chef’s kiss here; it was magnificent.

So were other memes.

And then Saturday, all over the US and the world, more than five million people turned out on city streets, in village squares and in front of Tesla dealerships, to tell the greedy bastards to keep their sticky mitts off our rights.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu