What Nation?
by Sam Friedman
As the winds and floodwaters
sculpted class, race and bigotry
in visions so vast even the media
took fleeting note;
and as the Prexy fiddled
while children drowned,
and the Haliburtons and developers
salivated further rivers
of acid brine
at the scent of contracts
and sodden homes to bulldoze,
replacing Black culture with theme parks
of lives now flooded gone—
the National Guard, the very "Our Boys"
they urge us to support
invaded the New Orleans poor
with orders—to shoot to kill.
Only deeper solidarities than "nation,"
only shared fears and lives
of working class soldiers
and working-class left-behinds,
and the remnant humanity
the system lusts to kill,
held the trigger-fingers stable,
and the bullets still
confined—
confined, as the poor lived
confined
by lack of dollars
to escape the floods,
and as those who escaped the waters live
confined
again,
in wire pens
with guards to hold them in,
confined
like their dead kin rotting
behind the moldering walls of flooded homes
in the poorer parts of town
confined.
volume 9(6)
This poem is copyright © September 2005,
Sam Friedman, all rights reserved.
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