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