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Jul 14, 2026
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Men in Short-Sleeved White Cotton Dress Shirts
I am old enough to remember
Sitting cross-legged on
The green carpeted floor
And watching
The chaos and clamoring
Set in motion
By men in short-sleeved white cotton
Dress shirts
Spewing toxins
At people who wanted to share their water fountain
I grew up
In the shadow
Of the Statue of Liberty
Standing and gazing out
With a note reminding us
Of the golden door
My grandparents walked through
But those
Men in their short-sleeved white cotton
Dress shirts
Were on Liberty Island too
Leaning hard with their shoulders
Against the door
I watched
Just today as
Cartoon soldiers
Caricatures of Boris and Natasha
With their porcelain egos
And masks on
Hiding their own brutality
From themselves and
Taking orders from those same men
In short-sleeved white cotton dress shirts
And I have read the history books
With their Homeric songs
Of conquerors
Blinded by the white Russian winter
Shouting orders that froze
When they opened their mouths
To be heard only by the dead
Fueled by the fear
Of their own atrophied muscles
Standing in their crisply ironed
short-sleeved white cotton dress shirts
And I now hear the whispering voice
Of my great-grandfather
Who squeezed through the Golden door
Escaping those white Russian winters
Reminding me
The men in white cotton dress shirts
Have built nothing but Potemkin villages
That will collapse
By the weight of their own hubris
And be swept up and dropped
Into the dustbin
That history provides
July 16, 2026
— Stevenjkashdan, Jul 14, 2026
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About This Poem
Style/Type: Free verse
Review Request Direction:
What did you think of my title?
What did you think of the rhythm or pattern or pacing?
How was the beginning/ending of the poem?
Review Request Intensity: I appreciate moderate constructive criticism
Editing Stage: Final polish
Critiques
neopoet
1 week ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem's central image — the short-sleeved white cotton dress shirt — does genuine work. It is mundane, domestic, almost pathetically ordinary, and that gap between the shirt's banality and the violence it clothes is where the poem's real energy lives. The first stanza earns this tension most cleanly: the specificity of green carpet and cross-legged children sitting beneath men who "spew toxins" at people near a water fountain grounds the historical reference without over-explaining it. The Liberty Island stanza also lands well, turning the Statue into a contested site rather than a settled symbol, and the detail of shoulders leaning against the door is quietly effective.
Where the poem loses ground is in the final two stanzas, where the accumulation of large names — Thucydides, Zeus, Yahweh, Buddha, Einstein — substitutes invocation for argument. These figures are listed rather than put to work, and the effect is diffusion rather than amplification; the poem's earned specificity gives way to abstraction at the moment it most needs to close with force. The closing image of a "fading whimper in the rush of time" is also the poem's least surprising phrase, a resolution that feels inherited rather than discovered. One path forward would be to let the great-grandfather carry the final movement on his own — his voice, his walk through the door, his name passed down — and trust that particularity to hold the weight the catalogue of authorities cannot.
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DrEvildeern
5 days 18 hours ago
Feedback
I honestly feel the first stanza can stand on its own. I found it extremely powerful.
Tink
5 days 16 hours ago
Howdy! I'm Tink
Welcome to Neopoet!!
I enjoyed your first poem! There sure is a lot to digest!! I will be back to revisit and see what i may have missed the first run through. I agree with DrEvildeern, the first stanza is extremely powerful!
If you have any questions or need any help traversing around Neopoet, please just ask! I can usually be found in the chatroom, which I hope to see you there. We are getting ready to launch some themed chatrooms and hope that you will swing by and check them out.
Thank you again for being a new part of Neopoet, and for sharing your work. I look forward to reading more of your work!
Live, Love & Laugh
(And don't forget to Write!!)
Yours in Ink,
Tink
Stevenjkashdan
5 days 1 hour ago
revision
In reading the critique, I edited the final paragraph,
It originally reads
And I now hear the whispering voice
Of my great-grandfather
Who walked through the Golden door
Gave me his name
And reminds me
As Thucydides before him
Both Zeus and Yahweh
The Buddha and Einstein
The emptiness
Is listening closely
As the men in short-sleeved white cotton dress shirts
Stammer with a voice that is a
Fading whimper in the
Rush of time
The edited version reads
And I now hear the whispering voice
Of my great-grandfather
Who squeezed through the Golden door
Escaping those white Russian winters
Reminding me
The men in white cotton dress shirts
Have built nothing but Potemkin villages
That will collapse
By the weight of their own hubris
And be swept up and dropped
Into the dustbin
That history provides
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