A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House
Linda Hillman Chayes
Election Lament
after Larry Levis
Soon, without exception, everyone
will be carved from stone.
The fountains in the courtyards and airports will run
dry & bone & airless,
Elephants in the room & lion-tamers in cages.
O composer for clown horns,
Laureate of the run-on verse, you
might suppose this is written about you…
If not, who? Women who wait in doorless waiting rooms?
Burning men who fight with foam under the Thunderdome?
Goodbye, little country.
Goodbye, neighborhoods of tolerance, bicyclists pedaling
from one end of town to the other
skirting mildew, shadow,
the bleak of sirens.
You can see that I am spinning
signals in spent bursts,
much like, as I peck my way
forward, the birdsong of someone
too tired to sleep as the bicycle horns bleep and bleep.
I beg your pardon, but did we not shout through a bullhorn
as if our lives depended on it?
And this cotton-candy truth on which we string our belief
less and less, at the hands of a jester.
For no reason and because
I can find no other compelling question, does everything we hold dear
even as a flag of spun sugar,
dissolve?
Devoured. By mouth
Linda Hillman Chayes is the author of the poetry chapbooks Not My First Walk on the Moon (2024) and The Lapse (2014), both from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in journals including Kestrel, American Poetry Journal, Bracken, Quartet, Westchester Review, 2 Horatio, and others. With Therese Rosenblatt, she co-edited The Voice of the Analyst: Narratives in Developing a Psychoanalytic Identity (Routledge, 2017). She holds a PhD in clinical psychology from City College of the City University of New York and is a practicing psychologist and psychoanalyst.
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