Lost in the Silence

Christmas Eve

I refill my whiskey glass

with snowlight

Christmas morning

the sound of snowflakes

on snowflakes

PoemHunter, December 24 2024

reprinted in NeverEnding Story, December 25 2024

Note: This haiku set could be read as a prequel to the following:

gazing

at snow crystals on the skylight

this Christmas morning

how small and how large

my world without you

NeverEnding Story, December 25 2023

Added: 

a whiff

of Christmas leftovers ...

things half-spoken

Added: Between Heaven and Hell, XV

half asleep, half awake ...

the in and out

of this 51st US state

FYI: Yahoo News, Dec. 26: Trump floats Wayne Gretzky as 'Governor of Canada' while Trudeau's Christmas message struggles to make a mark: "It no longer looks like a joke"

Donald Trump is offering Canadians a reduction of 'more than 60%' in taxes if their government joins America as its 51st state

Joe Biden's Parrot Haiku

Between Heaven and Hell, XIII

no one above law

Joe Biden's parrot repeats 

in gathering dark

PoemHunter, Dec. 2 2024

FYI: The New York Times, Dec. 2:  Joe Biden’s Pardon for His Son Dishonors the Office

Mr. Biden’s love for his son, as well as his anger about the way he was treated, was understandable, but the president’s consummate act of nepotism has stained the record of the Biden presidency.

The Guardian, Dec. 2: Joe Biden criticized by some supporters for pardoning son Hunter: ‘Selfish move’

“When you become President, your role is Pater familias of the nation. Hunter brought the legal trouble he faced on himself, and one can sympathize with his struggles while also acknowledging that no one is above the law, not a President and not a President’s son.”

The New Yorker, Dec. 2: Biden’s Pardon of Hunter Further Undermines His Legacy: By granting clemency to his son, the President put his family above the American people.

...the pardon extends to any “offenses” Hunter Biden “has committed or may have committed” starting in 2014. 

...by pardoning his son he is once more losing sight of his overriding objective: to diminish Donald Trump’s capacity to do violence to the liberal-democratic institutions which Biden claims his Presidency centered on upholding. Indeed, regardless of whether Biden’s age (now eighty-two) or his character is to blame, the statement he released about the pardon makes clear that he does not grasp the differences between his responsibilities to his job and his responsibilities to his family. “I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,” Biden wrote. 

The Trump team must surely be pleased today, because every conceivable argument it could make for allowing a man like Kash Patel to lead the F.B.I. may now sound just a bit more convincing to any wavering Republican... Biden’s decision allows Republicans to engage in the same cynicism about the system being rigged and corrupt, and Trump being no different than any other politician, that they have engaged in for nearly a decade...Biden is doing the work of people who want to wreck the best aspects of America’s democratic ethos.”

And this is a sequel to the following:

Game Show 2024, XXXI

fight for democracy ...

in dusk a puffed-up rooster

crows at ravens

NeverEnding Story, January 6 2024

FYI: CBS News, Jan. 5: President Joe Biden discusses fight for democracy in Montgomery County ahead of Jan. 6

"Whether democracy is still America's sacred cause is what the 2024 election is all about," Biden said. "The choice is clear. Donald Trump's campaign is about him, not America, not you. Donald Trump's campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He's willing to sacrifice our democracy to put himself in power. Our campaign is different."

And The Canadian Press, Jan. 20: Biden pardons his siblings and their spouses on his way out of the White House

...It was a remarkable use of Biden's presidential power: None of the above has been charged with any crime..., 

Under The Midnight Sun Tanka

The Brave New World,  LX

written in response to loud climate activism

a young activist

throws mashed potatoes

at a Monet ...

is there anything new

under the midnight sun

PoemHunter, October 25 2022

FYI: The Tyee, October 20, 2022: What Makes a Successful Protest? From throwing soup on van Gogh to trucking a convoy to Ottawa, there’s a difference between loud and effective activism.

Direct action meant to shock the public or disrupt everyday activities has a long history in activism...The unfortunate truth is that the public can get accustomed to certain forms of “polite” protest, such as marches. In turn, media outlets become less interested in covering those events.Just Stop Oil’s soup dousing was loud enough to be heard all over the internet, but it still failed — because theatrics need to be coupled with a clarity of mission. This was an activism non-sequitur, all sound and fury signifying… something?

A noble effort, but right now everyone’s still talking about soup instead of oil.

Sticker Shock and Pink Floyd Song Senryu

sticker shock at the pump ...

summer sex shorter

than a Pink Floyd song

PoemHunter, July 23 2022

Calming Room And The "President" Kyoka

staring out

the calming room window

the patient yells,

I’m the fucking President.

Take me to the Capitol now!

PoemHunter, June 29 2022

FYI: In healthcare facilities, calming rooms are personal safety-rooms, or de-escalation rooms.

And The New Yorker, June 29: "Cassidy Hutchinson’s Testimony Should Be the End of Donald Trump: Regardless of the legal obstacles to convicting the former President, the testimony of a former White House aide reconfirmed that Trump must never again be allowed anywhere near power."

Answering questions from the co-chair, the Republican Liz Cheney, Hutchinson calmly described an utterly unhinged President who, on January 6, 2021, was so determined to join his supporters—many of them armed and, he knew well, intent on causing trouble—in their march on Capitol Hill that he tried to grab the steering wheel of his Presidential S.U.V., yelling “I’m the fucking President. Take me up to the Capitol now!” 

Representative Elaine Luria, one of the Democratic members of the January 6th committee, told CNN after the hearing. Summing up what the evidence at each hearing is making ever more difficult to deny, Luria described the events of that day as “a conspiracy—a failed coup, essentially.”

Crashing Waves Haiku

the sound 

of crashing waves ... 

a teddy bear

PoemHunter, June 25 2022

Vigils in the Pearl of the Orient Tanka

Tiananmen vigils

banned in the Pearl of the Orient --

one candlelight

after another, another ...

in these condo windows

PoemHunter, June 4 2022

FYI: The New Yorker, June 4, 2019: Memories of Tiananmen Square by Jiayang Fan

June 4, 1989, remains the most unspeakable date in modern Chinese history. It was on that morning that the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on civilian protesters who had been gathering for weeks in Tiananmen Square, in the center of Beijing, to call for political reform...In China, the past is never past, but it is frequently purged. The story is rewritten, the narrative reframed, the villains and the heroes recast. There is a hallucinatory quality to such a society, as if you are living a life that does not and never can fully belong to you.

Now fiercer grows the battle's rage

written in response to The Guardian, May 26: Russian forces have "upper hand" in Donbas fighting, Ukrainian officials say

braids of smoke

through the blank-page sky

a boy's face

in the cellar window

of a half-collapsed house

streaks of blood

on the hospital hallway ...

a gray-haired nurse

looks out the broken window

to see Luhansk anew

PoemHunter, May 27 2022

FYI: The title is taken from an Irish ballad, The Battle of the Boyne, a historical battle fought in 1690 that was a critical turning point in Irish and  British history.

George W Bush's Freudian Slip Haiku

This Brave New World, XL

written in response to George W Bush's Freudian slip in his May 18 speech on "election integrity" given at George W. Bush Institute: the "decision of one man" to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal "invasion of Iraq."

stormy skies

another (oil rich) country 

burning on TV

PoemHunter, May 19 2022

What has been will be again

a haiku sequence written in response to mass shootings in the United States

on the news ticker

another mass shooting...

my son asks, anything new?

George Floyd Square

a white man shoots a black boy

with his finger pistol 

timeforchangetimeforchange ...

a police dog

barking at its echo

PoemHunter, May 16 2022  

Notes:

1 The title is taken from Old Testament, Ecclesiastes 1:9 (New International Version)

What has been will be again,

what has been done will be done again;

there is nothing new under the sun.

2 So far this year, there have been "201 mass shootings" in the United States, and it's only May. CNN and the Gun Violence Archive define a mass shooting as one that injures or kills four or more people... CNN News, May 16

3 Jessie Li, 'American Racism and the Buffalo Shooting, ' NewsLetter, May 16,2022

Once startling and noteworthy, mass shootings have melded into the background of life in the U.S, " Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, noting that there have been roughly two hundred such shootings recorded in the country so far this year. Yet some events still have the ability to shock. On Saturday afternoon, an eighteen-year-old who allegedly posted a hundred-and-eighty page "manifesto" avowing white-supremacist beliefs opened fire at a grocery store in the primarily Black neighborhood of Masten, in Buffalo, hitting thirteen people and killing ten. Taylor, who was born in Buffalo, writes that the shooting "must be viewed within the context of the growing normalization of racism and political violence in the U.S." Taylor examines the parallels between the shooter's manifesto and the rhetoric of conservative figureheads, including Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, and speaks with a local pastor, whose congregants were directly affected by the attack. "Many people were angry, " he says, and notes that the violence seems like a continuation of a broader trend of inequity that Black people in Masten have experienced. As Taylor writes, "For decades, Black life has been seen as disposable.

And The Guardian, May 15: Buffalo mass shooting: how white replacement theory keeps inspiring mass murder: This once fringe ideology, which was at the heart of Nazism, has gained mainstream traction thanks in part to the likes of Tucker Carlson on Fox News

The first listed goal in Payton Gendron's manifesto: “kill as many blacks as possible”.

The ideology that motivated Gendron’s mass murder in Buffalo, white replacement theory, has a lengthy and blood-soaked 20th-century history. Since 2011, it has been the explicit motivation for over 160 murders, including Norway’s Anders Breivik’s slaughter of 77 people, including some immigrants, in 2011, Dylann Roof’s mass murder of Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, the Tree of Life synagogue killings in 2018, and the murder of 23 people, mostly immigrants, in El Paso, Texas, in 2019.

Mass atrocities do not occur in a vacuum. They are enabled by a present normalization of a lengthy previous history, a process that the philosopher of mass killing Lynne Tirrell labels the social embeddedness condition. White replacement theory was the dominant structuring narrative of Nazi ideology. Adolf Hitler also announced his genocidal intent in a lengthy manifesto about the supposed Jewish threat to white civilization, entitled Mein Kampf, which was published in 1924. Hitler also was obsessed by mass immigration, and the threat it posed to “white civilization”.

Currently, white replacement theory has been mass popularized and normalized, perhaps chiefly by the American political commentator Tucker Carlson. It is rapidly moving to the center of the mainstream narrative of America’s Republican party. In this form, it appears stripped of its explicit connection to antisemitism. You will not find Tucker Carlson asserting that the Jews are behind the mass replacement of American whites that he bemoans regularly in what is regularly the most watched cable news show in the United States among adults 25-54.

Ring of Steel and Supreme Court Haiku

written in response to The Independent, May 7: Justice Clarence Thomas [a hardline conservative] tells Roe v Wade protesters that Supreme Court "won’t be bullied:"

The 73-year-old said that as a society, “we are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like”, according to Reuters.

“We can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want. The events from earlier this week are a symptom of that,” he said.

a ring of steel

around the Supreme Court

gathering dark

PoemHunter, May 7 2022 

FYI: Huffpost, May 7: Critics Erupt After Clarence Thomas Tells Americans To Deal With It On Roe v. Wade

Critics were stunned Saturday after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas scolded Americans for not accepting controversial rulings — after his own wife battled against the results of a legitimate presidential election.

Not only has his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, refused to “live with” the presidential election, he was the sole Supreme Court justice to vote that former President Donald Trump should not have have to release his White House documents to the House committee investigating last year’s insurrection.

Green New Deal Tanka

Parliament Hill 

under the spring sky 

a ponytail girl 

holding a placard, 

Green New Deal

PoemHunter, May 6 2022

Covid Burial Haiku

Three Hundred and Thirty-Eighth Entry,  Coronavirus Poetry Diary

written in response to NBC News, May 4: Covid's toll in the U.S. reaches a once unfathomable number, 1 million deaths: "It's an exponential number of other people that are walking around with a small hole in their heart," one widow said.

covid burial

few relatives and yet ...

a mourning dove's call

PoemHunter, May 5 2022

FYI: YahooNews, May 5: WHO estimates 15 million people have died due to COVID-19 pandemic

The World Health Organization on Thursday released new estimates that show nearly 15 million people in the world have died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic — or roughly three times more than the number of coronavirus deaths officially reported.

Added: Three Hundred and Thirty-Ninth Entry, written in response to the (recorded) millionth American death in the coronavirus pandemic. 

one million

deaths once unfathomable ...

unmasked shoppers 

drown out the sound of news

with chatter and laughter

PoemHunter, May 6 2022

 

FYI: Democracy Now's May 13 Headline: White House Marks 1 Million U.S. Deaths from COVID-19.

... President Biden has ordered U.S. flags flown at half-staff, as the White House marked 1 million deaths from COVID-19 since the first cases were detected just over two years ago.

President Joe Biden: “Today we mark a tragic milestone here in the United States: 1 million COVID deaths, 1 million empty chairs around the family dinner table, each irreplaceable, irreplaceable losses.”

Biden spoke from a virtual White House summit on the pandemic, where he called again on Congress to pass funding to combat COVID-19 at home and around the globe. Biden initially requested $22 billion from Congress in March — a figure rejected by public health advocates as too small. The request is now for $10 billion and remains stalled on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, U.S. COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to rise. On Thursday, states reported over 115,000 new cases — and that’s likely a significant undercount due to an increase in home testing...

Windswept Snow And Lengthening Shadow Haiku

sound of windswept snow

the only companion

my 

          lengthening 

                               shadow

PoemHunter, April 27 2022 

April Snow And My Shadow Haiku

Aprilsnow

onsnowonsnow

the

     length

            of

               my

                   shadow

PoemHunter, April 26 2022

Scars And First Love Tanka

midnight moon 

shedding light on the scars 

of our past 

I hold my first love 

closer and tighter

PoemHunter, April 25 2022

Liquor Store And Church Kyoka

mental health? 

not a thing in my hood 

the patient continues 

a liquor store and a church 

on every block

PoemHunter, April 18 2022

Whispers Tanka

I push her hand away ...

she whispers in my ear

you don't know

what you're missing

if you never had it

PoemHunter, April 6 2022

Selfie Stick and Northern Lights Haiku

the reach 

of my selfie stick ...

northern lights

PoemHunter, April 1 2022

FYI: blogTO, March 31: Solar flares increase chances of seeing the northern lights near Toronto

Rose-Fingered Dawn Tanka

rose-fingered dawn

slips through the skyline

of Toronto

a songbird and I 

bring news of spring

PoemHunter, March 31 2022