What Rough Beast | 09 10 20 | Marjorie Moorhead

Marjorie Moorhead
Only Love Songs

From now on, every poem I write
shall be simply
a love song.
Closing my eyes
because the planet is dying.
I must sing its beauty.
Closing my eyes because people
are trying for breath;
in a white supremacist grip.
And breath is peace. Breath is ease.
May we stop policing BREATH, please?!

From now, I’ll sing only of love;
write words of description;
petals, leaves, clouds, trees, hoping
We Shall Overcome. Peace, please
find us all on this overheating planet.
With the benevolent beauty
of a cooling breeze justice must prevail.
March in throngs, in a rainbow arch,
write the wrongs, chant the songs.

—Submitted on 08/31/2020

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of the chapbooks Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press 2019), and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books 2020). Her poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-GigPorter House ReviewVerse-VirtualRising Phoenix ReviewAmethyst Review, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including most recently Covid Spring (Hobblebush Books, 2020). 

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