EPITAPH by Carolyn Ladelle Bennett (Sierra Leone)
going out EDWARD MYCUE I went out into the sun of broken glass for the customary words everywhere joined like…
A nation dying of self-inflicted mental and moral wounds turns rabid-extremist. Leadership crippled by corruption, moral impairment, physical and mental decay, capable of nothing other than the same old thing, flails and destroys and in cowardice (likened to an infant, but powered by lethal partners), ducks responsibility and blames a made-for-the-occasion “enemy.”
America’s leadership class of kleptocrats, gerontocrats, incestuous hangers-on and clingers to Washington’s revolving door are the American (anachronistic, anarchist, nihilist) extremists. They create and feed on global and national crises; and spawn America’s weakness, unpreparedness, and loss of common defense. Their age must end. Epitaph returns to the framers of the American Union, lays out the nature of present-day American extremism with critical evidence from distant headlines and information sources and context of world thinkers — originating far beyond the Washington Beltway. The work ends with advisory notes to youth, and notes toward forming a “More Perfect Union.”
Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is the author of several books concentrating on U.S. politics, public affairs, and international relations. Bennett has worked in several U.S. states and the District of Columbia as a university professor and as an employee with the U.S. government. She began her career as a secondary-school teacher with the Peace Corps in Freetown, Sierra Leone (1964-66).
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Epitaph: Extremism, (Anachronism, Anarchism, Infantilism, Nihilism)
or A More Perfect Union
by Carolyn Ladelk Bennett (Sierra Leone 1964-66)
Xlibris Publisher
252 pages
August 2022
$3.99 (Kindle); $17.99 (Paperback); $31.99 (Hardback)
going out EDWARD MYCUE
I went out into the sun of broken glass
for the customary words
everywhere joined
like the ox to the cart.
I went out queer, clumsy, ready
eggshell-skinned
drinking the evening
thickening and soft.
I went out quelling my angers
getting jealous alone
trying it again
before the sunset faded.
I went out thinking
I had choices.
© Copyright Edward Mycue 5 February 2021 rev. February 7, 2022 For Laura Kennelly
“Time quietly compiling us like sheaves/ Turns round one day, beckons the special few,/ With one bird singing somewhere in the leaves,/ …. / How marvelous to have done it and then left It in the lost property office of the loving mind….”
–from Lawrence Durrell’s poem ‘Seferis’ published in VEGA AND OTHER POEMS in 1973, page 54 (Overlook Press, Woodstock NY)
OZ ZEN TAO A MOMENT OF COMPREHENSION WHEN THERE IS NO ONE THERE
Modern Parable with a Prose Poem overcoat about the Peace Corps, Endless Wars, and the End of the planet Earth February 19, 2022 at 4:28 a.m.
by Edward Mycue (Ghana 1961)
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This is from an early PC Volunteer Ghana 1961, old now — 85 on March 21, 2022: It seems so long ago and yesterday when in 1960 I came up for more graduate study from North Texas State in Denton to Boston University and as a Lowell Fellow an intern at WGBH-TV the then New England Television station on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge just over the Charles River from Boston on Massachusetts Avenue above a former roller rink and as Louis Lyons assistant on his twice weekly 14:28 second programs of News and the other of profiles and special subjects. In the summer June 1960 as the technical assistant I began on his many programs about Senator J F Kennedy and others in their reach for their Party’s nominations — Harold Stassen was Republican nomination seeker. But also Hubert Humphrey, Adalai Stevenson, Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Kennedy and others others came on. Often there was talk of what came to be, later, in the Fall 1960 the name PEACE CORPS. The next year, still on the job I took the test, and in time, in June the call to go to Ghana and I went first to Berkeley for training. Then at the tail end of August I headed up to D.C. stopping first home to Dallas to seem my dad and mom and six siblings. Dad was ailing (it turned out terminal cancer and by October I was sent back home to be the financial head of our family for the next six years, I being the first in our families with college education). But on the way up to D.C. just before heading off in that 2 engine prop Covair to the Azores, Dakar in Senegal, then Ghana my contingent of 50 went up to the White House and met Kennedy for my third time (I’d met him when he was a Senator seeking the Party nod and then in the Fall as the Democrat Party candidate). Now we are talking of the 61st anniversary of our PEACE CORPS next month my 85th birthday month. Peace is not around some corner, nor may it ever be, but it is still to sought. I was born in Niagara Falls, NY in 1937 in a Depression when WAR in Europe and WAR in the Pacific was already swelling and staining the world, our planet. War continues and also now also while peoples and countries “attle” there are pandemics and illness that are endemic along with possibly also through weather, climate, life’s end, and possibly (it is not far fetched to suggest) the demise of our planet. (It used to be in the phrase from The Group, a novel by Mary McCarthy, “Who’d a thunk it” only IN THOSE farfetched Science Fiction pulp stories and novels.) SMACKDOWN is a phrase used about those dick-on-dick boxing punch-outs. I’ll stop here at 4:29 am San Francisco CA, Feb 19, 2022. This could be a modern parable in the often described prose poetry style. It will have no traction for any possible future I fear this palpable night.
Edward Mycue 3595 Geary Blvd, Unit 320, San Francisco CA 94118 (C) Copyright Edward Mycue 4:31AM Saturday February 19, 2022
PEACE IS A PLACE IN EVERY BREATH
We didn’t invent ourselves nor get it off the grass
way back down that long winding longing line.
We have been seeking to be a people from the
beginning of our supposed origins. Will we end
before we have exploded and regrouping merged?
Staying home doesn’t mean some kind of surrender.
New definitions for older versions are bound in blood
Toil can re-make the rainbow to re-arc the bridge hope.
© copyright Edward Mycue
EACH IS MINE
Not everything is equal to anything else.\
(example: I almost never locate a shirt I want and I’ll end up grabbing another — yet each I take is also mine also. I could explain this as “process,” being a hand-me-down or younger sibling-thing.)
I recall hearing mom’s grandmother Jane Kennedy DelehantBorn in 1879
with her “Thee’s” & “Thou’s” and her “Dearie’s”
rocking on that ash chair on our porch on 8th Street behind
our City Hall in Niagara Falls, NY saying
“You don’t get it off the grass”
“You’ll follow the crows before you die” (if you waste)
“Everybody’s odd but thee and me, dearie…”
Pause, smiling adding, cutting her eyes adding
“…and sometimes I wonder about thee.”
Grammy Delehant died by the time I was 9 or 10
(it must be as I’ll be 85 next month born 21- III-37
She helped form me.
(C) Copyright EDWARD MYCUE 21 V 2016 revised