Tag Archives: Ukraine

Putin’s Puppet Party (the PPP, used to be the GOP)

Thomas Davis

is on the roll of rolls.
I mean, tariffs are terrifying the world as Mr. Trump trumps his ego
with a paroxysm of actions that have Americans checking their wallets
and the rest of the world wondering who unlocked Pandora’s box this time.
But don’t worry,
Putin’s not worried.
Russia wasn’t hit with a single tariff.
After all, they haven’t signed on to the cease fire Mr. Trump said they’d sign,
and what’s happened?
The PPP has come out with excuses piled on excuses,
and the bombs have continued to blow up schools, hospitals, and power plants,
and Russian soldiers have continued to die
as they inch forward on Ukrainian soil,
and NATO is scared to death it’s collapsing
as Trump fumes about his allies and knows Putin is his best friend.

There was a time when the GOP was a stalwart against Communism.
The Red Menace was a plague that had to be stopped!
There was even a time when Dwight Eisenhower
stood as solid as a giant
and took on Facism worldwide and beat it
and then joined Churchill in decrying the evils of the Russian Empire.
I remember all that. Don’t you?
Eisenhower was once the President and the leader of the GOP.

But that’s old history now.
The PPP is in charge.
They have the majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives,
and Mr. Trump won a landslide by the skin of the skin of his teeth,
although he denies the latter part of that statement—
and don’t worry.
The stock market is collapsing,
a recession, or maybe stagflation, that strange beast, is around the corner,
and the entire world wonders what kind of new enemy has arisen in the west,
but the PPP is assuring us we can trust in Trump.
After all, Mr. Putin says we can.
I tell you, the PPP, even as it repeats endlessly strings of lies,
never leads anyone astray!

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Filed under I ought to go eat worms, poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis

A child sits next to its dead mother near a bombed-out bridge

By Thomas Davis

staring emptily at blue sky, no tears in her blue eyes.

The Russian Putin, eyes burning even though there is deadness in them,
smiles as women with long hair and beautiful voices sing
a celebration into being, praising him, shining into his manhood.

An Australian man wades
through water up to his chest as a tree trunk, floating on waters
polluted with the sewage and debris of a once prosperous town,
sails toward where he is struggling to reach dry land.
In yet another world.
A tornado, in a month that almost never has tornadoes,
strikes a farmhouse, collapsing the roof onto the screams
of a child not the child staring at an empty Ukrainian sky.
In yet in another world,
a fire tornado explodes into a smoke-clogged sky,
leaping roaring flames through the crowns of trees
as a town’s homes are consumed by dancing, searing flames.
In yet another world
a line of children with distended bellies struggle,
with their mothers, to reach a makeshift hospital,
large eyes seeing nothing but the gnawing exhaustion of hunger.

In Greenland, one glacier after another
splashes massive ice cliffs into seawaters swelling
outward into concentric half circles of waves.
In Iowa and sub-Saharan Africa, birds of prey
circle above a dry landscape of shriveled crops
as hot sun mocks the thought that clouds and rain
can bring life to the earth again.
In a hospital in Sturgeon Bay, a daughter
sits in the parking lot as her mother struggles to breathe
as a doctor and nurses are putting her on a ventilator
in a desperate attempt to save her life.

President Trump in DC, standing beside a dark red Tesla
and a grinning Elon Musk shills for a man
causing children in Africa to die of AIDs and starvation.

On the television set, after seeing a missile explode
into a high-rise apartment where two dozen people have died,
an analyst tells us how angry people are about rising gas prices.
Then a commercial urges us to improve our lives
by purchasing a brand new, elegant, black showerhead
to help us cleanse ourselves.

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After Bucha, Ukraine

By Thomas Davis

Bucha was known as Ukraine’s Switzerland. Now it is synonymous with unimaginable horror.

            Charles McPhedran, Mother Jones Magazine


I keep imagining Yevtushenko on a Moscow stage in 1961,
young, eyes bright, arms flailing, his pacing energy
exploding into a wild, deep voice
as he declaims about Babi Yar and Stalin’s evil
as Jewish bodies decayed in an unmarked ravine in Ukraine.

I keep seeing the Russian crowd,
glittering sophistication,
stunned at first and then roaring
as poetry stirs in the Russian soul
and reminds them that Stalin, the Tsars,
the years when peasants struggled for survival,
the siege of the Nazis at Stalingrad
were the past, never to be repeated.

Inside that image, I keep sensing
the old Russian bear stirring,
shapeshifting, growling old resentments
into bombs that explode into apartment buildings
and schools and maternity wards
where new-born babies and their mothers
lie screaming as walls shudder and fall.

And I keep wondering if it is Russians
rising out of their history into rage—

or if the Russians are humankind
attacking, attacking, attacking
all life on earth out of history and insatiable greed.

“Blood is flowing,
spreading across the floors,” Yevtushenko wrote.
“And I, myself,
am one massive, soundless scream
above the thousand thousand buried here.”

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Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis