Chen-ou Liu's Translation Project: First English-Chinese Haiku and Tanka Blog

Friday, January 6, 2023

House Speaker Tanka

This Brave New World, LXV
for Kevin McCarthy

a speaker
has not been elected
echoing through the House
again, again and again
the sound of his scrubbing the floor


FYI: The New Yorker, Jan.3 : Behind the [once-in-a-century] Humiliation of Kevin McCarthy: 

The G.O.P. has gone from being a disciplined party of limited government to a party of anti-government protest to, now, a party of performative verbiage.

This gradual substitution of theatric self-promotion for serious politics has been ongoing ever since Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, and Tuesday’s events merely represented its logical culmination: a newly elected House Republican majority reduced to a rabble incapable of performing the basic function of selecting a leader.


Added: reading between the lives and writing between the lines, LVIII
written in response to a forthcoming memoir, Spare

two brats lock horns
in the gathering dark
Buckingham Palace

FYI: Sky News, Jan. 6: Prince Harry: Biggest revelations from his new book Spare

Claims brother attacked him

Harry alleges the Prince of Wales grabbed his brother and ripped his necklace before knocking him to the floor.

He says "Willy" called his wife Meghan "difficult", "rude" and "abrupt".

"Everything happened so fast. Really, really fast. He grabbed me by the collar of my shirt, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor.

"I fell on top of the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces of it cutting into me. I lay on the ground for a few seconds, dazed, then got up and told him to leave."

The incident allegedly took place at Nottingham Cottage when Harry was living there in 2019.


Addedreading between the lives and writing between the lines, LIX

little things I take 
when I turn the other cheek
to a racial slur
like Jesus
or a coward