Napoleon Trump (poetry).

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: An American Story

To be a true American is to welcome atrocities at home and abroad as signs of progress. Dismissing the shameful leadership in European capitals, excluding Russia, and in Israel.

Rumi, a thirteenth century Persian/Palestinian poet recognised in ‘Only Breath’ common humanity:

There is a way between voice and presence

where information flows

In disciplined silence it opens

With wondering talk it closes

W.H. Auden, ‘September 1^st 1939’, understood how it felt after a ‘low dishonest decade’ (which describes Trump perfectly) and what we would become.

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-Second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

…What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return

…About Democracy,

And what dictators do

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book

The enlightenment driven away

The habit forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief

We must suffer them all again

…All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

…There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizens or the police;

We must love one another, or die.

Auden later wanted to rewrite the line in his penultimate stanza, because it doesn’t make sense: we all die, anyway. The genius of it rests on its ambiguity. It allows us a choice of how we die. And how we live (‘Our world in stupor lies,’ but we don’t need to be). We can acquiesce or offer passive (‘All I have is voice’) or active resistance ('Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame’).    

When we talk about rewriting history, we need to look at Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy’s ‘Revenge’ from a different America, Central America, Nicaragua.

My personal revenge

Will be to give you those hands you once ill-treated

With all their tenderness intact.

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