A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House
Maria Rouphail
This Is How I Will Save My Life
For who except myself has yet conceiv’d what your children en-masse really are?
—Walt Whitman
I. Disaster
A passenger jet and a helicopter collide at night.
Both fall into freezing water. Everyone dies.
We the living, huddling before our screens,
feel the steady rise of fear.
For we, too, have fallen from a height,
have plunged into something like an icy river.
It happened so quickly, the descent into darkness
flooding our lungs, deadening our senses.
Many warned of this fate,
too many others refused to hear.
But the price of eggs! they said.
II. Prelude
In that time when the storm
was a smudge on a meteorologist’s map,
wolves stirred in their dens. What did they smell
a thousand days away?
Now the wolves are howling
in this devil wind, full of hate.
And the country lies prone in its path.
III. Action
I will write, write, write
until my heart is empty of words.
O my country! You must find your heart.
Do not go into the tent of your fear.
Do not cower there.
Maria Rouphail is the author of the poetry collections This Small House, This Big Sky (Redhawk Publications, 2025), All the Way to China (Finishing Line Press, 2022), and Second Skin (Main Street Rag, 2015), as well as the chapbook Apertures (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her poems and reviews have appeared in International Poetry Review, Wild Goose Poetry Review, and Pedestal Magazine, among other journals. Now a senior lecturer emerita at North Carolina State University, she taught courses in world literature and served as an academic adviser for the English major. Rouphail is poetry editor of Main Street Rag and lives in Raleigh, NC.
Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.
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