Enormous Balloons (On Modern Poets)

My World and your world, our world together is rotten. Have you looked out the window, or turned on the news? From the human rights breaches in eastern Darfur Or the gangs in your city selling drugs on your street. And who can we look at to fix these problems? The police are underfunded, and so too are the schools. Our leaders corrupted for a little petty cash And they'll happily wallow and fester in their pits So who is left here to make a stand? Well tilt your head back, and look to the sky. For the ones who are left are floating above us. Enormous groups of enormous balloons. Tied together and filled with too much hot air And on they go, higher and higher still Till we, beneath them are but miniscule and small.

— Kieran Nelson, Feb 06, 2008

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Quillsvein1

18 years 4 months ago

now

THIS gives me a rush--both the comment at the end (the writers of "Poetry" magazine are morbid aesthete disciples of the NeoFormalist zombies who swear allegaince to Dana Gioia)and the poem itself. as we speak young women are being brutally raped, tortured, and atrocities i don't even want to write here are being committed in Darfur without a BIT OF AID from our reprehensible President or his minions, busy having young men and women killed in a war they cooked up for their own financial benefit. you do a fantastic job here of making a political/poetic commentary on the seeming indifference of the authorites and people to human suffering. there is one who is never indifferent and there are social activists who will never stop: these are the only things that console me. a bold, great poem! inspiring.