A Poem on ‘Black Lives Matter’ and Others by C.B. Anderson

Context Is Everything

When you attempt to cut some string
A hammer doesn’t do a thing—
Jackknives matter.

When life has gotten back to normal,
And dining out means dressing formal,
Black ties matter.

When you are carted off to jail
And wish that you were back at Yale,
Hacksaws matter.

And if you wolfed your burger lunch
But long for something more to munch,
French fries matter.

You come home sodden from a bar
And she accepts you as you are—
Slack wives matter.

As long as they vote Democrat
And laud the likes of Arafat,
Black lives matter.

Family Matters

The individuals who love me most
Are those whom I’m most likely to let down.
Although they greet me with a heartfelt host
Of smiles, I tender them my deepest frown.

And why this should be so I scarcely know,
For it provides me no distinct advantage
In what’s become a bloody to-and-fro
For which no brand of prophylactic bandage

Has ever been devised, and I’m surprised
We still communicate at all. What’s more,
I can’t believe that no one realized
That we would end up in an all-out war.

The closer the relationship, the worse
The conflicts seem to be, which indicates
That kin—by blood or marriage—should converse
With soothing words that spark no fierce debates.

The Need to Know

It’s human to make effort to explain
Phenomena and noumena that vex us:
Injustice, rank corruption, fear and pain;
Direct assaults upon the solar plexus.

The brightest sunny skies cannot prevent
Eventual decay of day to night,
And when we wonder where the future went
The clear consensus is: It’s taken flight.

Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep on trying
To make some sense of what we apprehend,
Because the only other option’s dying
In ignorance detachment can’t amend.

Revelations

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Another storm tonight, with rain
____And driven sleet
Inflicting constant waves of pain
____On those who meet

Together in a drafty room
____Below a church.
The lines of Scripture they exhume
____Begin the search

For revelations founded on
____Experience
And not on words of men long gone
____Who lived in tents.

C.B. Anderson was the longtime gardener for the PBS television series, The Victory Garden.  Hundreds of his poems have appeared in scores of print and electronic journals out of North America, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Australia and India.  His collection, Mortal Soup and the Blue Yonder was published in 2013 by White Violet Press