Every frivolous whim

I’ve been thinking that we—meaning I—need something to start the new month off on a different note from most of my posts for National Poetry Month. May 1^st is May Day, which in European tradition celebrates the full blossoming of Spring. It’s also Beltane, in the Celtic calendar, marking the halfway point between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. It’s also International Workers Day, celebrating the strength and value of the laboring classes around the world. And it's a day beloved by dictators to show off their military prowess.

For all these reasons, today’s earworm should be exuberant, lively and danceable. So “The Lusty Month of May” has buzzing around my head for about a week and a half. It’s from the musical Camelot, with Queen Guenevere urging the Knights of the Round Table and the courtiers to cast off the gloom of winter, bust some moves and be fruitful.

Now, I’d been thinking about the song just because it’s such an animated piece. But this week I started considering the setting—the whole play; that made me sad. Because Camelot is about a king who wants to turn the notion of might makes right around and create a court where those with power don’t use it to oppress those without it, but instead deploy might for right.

In the end, it collapses not so much because Lancelot and Guenevere’s love betrays Arthur, but because that evil toad Mordred poisons the entire court, bringing it all down; all of it. The final scene is Arthur telling a young Tom of Warwick:

“Don’t let it be forgot
“That once there was a spot
“For one, brief shining moment
“That was known as Camelot.”

And this caused me to wonder if we in the United States are in that moment where everything is crashing down because an evil toad poisoned our society and we’re about to be consigned to the mists of history.

Well, anyway—“The Lusty Month of May”, from the original Broadway cast.

©2026 Bas Bleu

Rough beasts

When William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, the world was still picking up the pieces after four years of total war, and was awash in the global influenza pandemic. But here we are, more than a hundred years on, and it feels like it describes the past 15 months entire.

I don’t know what more I can say about it. Except that it closes out National Poetry Month for 2026, and it’s up to us to deal with that rough beast.

“The Second Coming”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

I saw him drowning

Since he started his pointless war of choice against Iran, the Kleptocrat has apparently discovered that a lot of wars in history have lasted years. This he finds agreeable, because he’s able to compare a war lasting (so far) eight weeks favorably against ones that last four, six or 18 years (World War I, World War II, Vietnam—although the last seems to vary in his mind; that appears as whatever two-digit number that pops into the porridge that occupies his cranium).

He still expects that Nobel Peace Prize, dammit.

The First World War is one of my research concentration areas as a military historian. It was a cataclysmic convergence of technological advances, imperial and nationalistic policies, and just plain unfuckingbelievable stupidity. What a way to usher in the 20^th Century, eh?

Rather oddly, a lot of poetry came out of those four years—at least amongst the British forces. Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon are a few of the best-known. My favorite, though, is Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action just seven days before the Armistice of 11 November 1918.

It’s hard to choose which of his poems to share; every one of them puts you through some horror that the Western Front vomited forth to everyone in the vicinity of the trenches. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” could be applied to any soldiers of any war

But the first poem of Owen's I ever read was “Dulce et Decorum est”, so that’s what I’m giving you.

One of the examples of monumental stupidity during that war was the use of lethal gas, either delivered via artillery or just released. It’s like the morons running the show never considered that they were surrounded by winds, which can shift and send your hot-shot latest chemical weapon…well, anywhere, including through your own lines. Chlorine, phosgene, mustard and other types were all deployed by armies on both sides. They caused serious damage to individual pulmonary systems without having any serious effect on strategy. The descriptions of poison gas victims are not for the faint of heart: imagine being blind and feeling your lungs being on fire even as they fill up with fluid and drown you.

The green referenced in the poem is chlorine gas. One of the effects of chlorine gas was to react with fluid in the lungs to form hydrochloric acid, which caused death, or (at a minimum) permanent scarring of the lung tissue. In smaller doses, it caused irritation of the eyes, coughing and vomiting. Chlorine's green clouds made it less effective over time because it could be seen; chemists quickly iterated to come up with something invisible.

But, hey, good news: there are still stockpiles of poison gas on hand in nations around the world, in case someone wants to start a war of territorial expansion. It's a mark of progress, I guess. (Saddam Hussein used it in his war against Iran back in the last century.)

BTW—Cadet Bonespurs famously declined to visit an American WWI cemetery during the Centenary commemoration of the end of that war, because the weather was inclement and he couldn’t fathom why they would have given the last full measure of devotion, since there wasn’t really anything in it for them.

In this poem Owen describes the aftermath of such an attack. It, also, is not for the faint of heart. It would do our white Christian nationalist glory hound SecDef some good to read it; like that'll ever happen.

“Dulce et Decorum est”

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

If you’re unfamiliar with the final line, it’s from an ode by the Roman poet Horace. It translates roughly to, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

Dragging their brains along

If you think that the Kleptocrat and his toadies have no imperial ambitions, I hope you are not operating heavy machinery. White Americans formed this country on the foundation of Manifest Destiny; that still shapes the policies of the best of our governments. The white Christian nationalists in the Republican party are using Mr. I’m-not-a-pedophile to solidify their notions of a theocratic state that uses imperial-level power to bend the world to their will. The pedophile is mostly in it for the money grab and the thrill of exercising power, but it amounts to the same thing.

For today’s entry for National Poetry Month, I’m giving you Jesús Castillo’s “Untitled”, for a few thoughts about empire. Castillo was born in San Luís Potosí, Mexico, emigrated to California at age 11 and now lives in Oaxaca, Mexico. Along the way at some point, he earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.

Castillo said, about this poem, that the job of the poet today is to have fun and to observe, and to have fun with what s/he observes. So, here we go.

         Dear Empire, I am confused each time I wake inside you.
                        You invent addictions. 
          Are you a high-end graveyard or a child?
                        I see your children dragging their brains along.
                        Why not a god who loves water and dancing
                   instead of mirrors that recite your pretty features only?

          You wear a different face to each atrocity.
          You are un-unified and tangled.
                        Are you just gluttony?
                        Are you civilization’s slow grenade?

             I am confused each time I’m swallowed by your doors.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: It finds its wings

Well, y’all know I’m not a fan of Emily Dickinson. Lord knows, I’ve tried, but it just doesn’t come.

But for this Gratitude Monday in National Poetry Month. I was thinking about how much a sparrow enjoyed the birdbath I provide for my avian friends, and when you search for “poems about birds”, Dickinson pops right up at the top.

For reference, the sparrow:

I mean—its joy is infectious, and I’m so grateful to have been able to make it possible.

So—Emily:

“Even the Smallest Wings”

A tiny bird upon the breeze,
Gliding high with so much ease.
Though small in size, it finds its way,
Soaring freely every day.

It does not fear the heights so steep,
Nor doubts the journey it must keep.
For wings, though small, were made to fly,
To chase the sun, to touch the sky.

So let the birds remind us true,
No dream’s too big for me or you.
With faith and courage, we can try -
Even the smallest wings can fly!

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Despite expert advice

No one—but no one—could turn a phrase like Dorothy Parker. That woman could pack more venom into a single couplet than anyone who’s ever picked up a pen. Born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893, Parker was part of the creative explosion in New York after World War I. Poet, critic, playwright, screenwriter; she was one of the linchpins of the Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel. She could drink most of the men under that table and never lose a battle of wits.

Parker was also a human rights activist: against fascism and racism, for civil rights and decency. At her death in 1967, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Much of Parker’s poetry is self-deprecating, particularly with respect to her disappointments in love. (If you’ve been diagnosed with depression, you really want to stay away from her short stories. They’re beautifully written, but they’ll gut you like a fish knife.) Here’s one that’s a little more defiant; if I had to choose a personal anthem, this would be it.

I think it’s an exemplary way to conduct our lives during this time.

“Neither Bloody nor Bowed”

They say of me, and so they should,
It's doubtful if I come to good.
I see acquaintances and friends
Accumulating dividends,
And making enviable names
In science, art, and parlor games.
But I, despite expert advice,
Keep doing things I think are nice,
And though to good I never come-
Inseparable my nose and thumb!

 

©2026 Bas Bleu