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Home Poetry Culture

‘A Rant’: A Poem by Reid McGrath

August 27, 2025
in Culture, Poetry
A A
6
poems 'A Rant': A Poem by Reid McGrath

.

A Rant

.

I.

Pay for a surrogate to birth you a kid.
Feed it on formula falsely construed.
Drop it in daycare for hours on end;
shunt it to public-school where it’s imbued

with half-truths of History and little lies
fostered by doctors deluded or dumb.
The Mission: to keep it vegetablized—
perpetually sucking Society’s thumb.

Burdened with debt and no practical skills,
renting and loafing the weekends goodbye,
depressed and diseased the ephemeral thrills
dampen and darken and mildew and die.

.

II.

Or you can find a fecund little wife:
who loves you with all of her soul and her heart
a sourdough savage—wielding a knife—
a real renegade: devout and stalwart.

Delivering babies without any drugs
and suckling them on the milk of her breast,
homeschooling heroes and not whiney thugs;
and this is what, friends, will rescue the West.

Raised in the School of Beauty and Truth,
of Faith and Reason and farming and fun,
hunting and fishing and learning their tooth
might get knocked out but they’ll never be done…

.

.

Reid McGrath lives and writes in the Hudson Valley Region of New York.

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Comments 6

  1. Roy Eugene Peterson says:
    4 months ago

    Trenchant and poignant poem that dazzles with the brilliant light of truth.

    Reply
    • Reid McGrath says:
      4 months ago

      Thank you, guys.

      Reply
  2. Jordan says:
    4 months ago

    Well done. A fine critique of our “modernity.” In Australia there was a scandal of child sexual abuse at a childcare centre. One man abused scores of children. The government pushes and pushes for children to go straight to daycare so mum can work. C sections are incentivised leaving mother and baby without the benefits of natural birth. The list goes on and on.

    I appreciate your nod to the courageous woman, the “sourdough savage” I absolutely love it and am blessed to have a wonderful wife.

    Reply
  3. James Sale says:
    4 months ago

    The vitriol of truth flows, Reid – nice work!

    Reply
  4. Paul A. Freeman says:
    4 months ago

    Isn’t there a middle road, allowing a mother to have a career rather than become ‘a fecund little wife’?

    And as for home schooling, not everyone has the ability to impart knowledge. And then there’s the danger of imbuing our children with our own prejudices, denying them friends and acquaintances outside the tradlife utopia, and leaving them socially inept clones of ourselves.

    School systems aren’t perfect and not every woman (or man) is fertile enough to produce a brood, nor perhaps wants to produce a brood.

    Your poem(s) leaves us much to think about. One interesting fact is that my kids tended to recognise bias and bad at school, something we could talk about together and which gave my kids confidence.

    Thanks for the read, Reid.

    Reply
    • C.B. Anderson says:
      4 months ago

      I applaud you, Paul, for being so consistent: always the asshole! Your wisdom could fit inside an ampule filled with fairy dust, with room to spare. It’s sad that you somehow managed to reproduce.

      Reply

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