Please help the Black Earth Institute continue to make art and grow community so needed for our time. Donate now »

a literary journal published by the Black Earth Institute dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society

Jack Hirschman


Light on the Klamath – Rabia O’Loren

(untitled)

Oil water black gold
Goil watch her glack bold
Cross the border drill a hole
Arizona why you so cold

Detroit city has got its eyes
Absolutely privatized
Motown lowdown Louis Joe
Everything backwards doncha know

35 thousand people without water
They refused to send their daughters
To the streets to ho, retaw retaw
Is what they backwards cry

Water water will drown this rotten
System of money-stuffed mouths
Of systemic liars one day our pliers
Will get into their choppers

And yank out all the teeth of their bite
And make them open their toothless
Mouths and fit them over the pipes
Where the spill of such swill

Of profits galore will finally be stopped
By the corporate thieves and downright
Plunderers of everything decent in life
So let their muzzles guzzle till they drown

And everyone in Detroit town and New
Orleans and Cleveland too will raise
A toast of water from no sink without it,
Agua acqua wasser voda—hallelujan nature again!

 

Author Biography:

Jack Hirschman – Emeritus 4th Poet Laureate of the City of San Francisco (2006-2009), author of The Arcanes, and translator of more women poets than any poet—male or female—in the United States. He is member of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade,a group of politically engaged poets, which began in San Francisco two years ago and has since migrated to to New Mexico, Vermont and Paris and Rome.

Share: 

©2024 Black Earth Institute. All rights reserved.  |  ISSN# 2327-784X  |  Site Admin