This is my first “tenderfoot” Diary for DKos. (I’ve been a member since 2018.) With thanks to encouragement from friends at the Saturday Morning Garden Blog, I offer the following:
Many of the poems or essays I write appear to me first as images, either imagined or created by someone else. I find political illustrations or cartoons especially compelling because they pack a powerful message when they are skillfully drawn.
During and after the Trump years, three specific images continued to capture my attention. One was the familiar statue of Lady Justice, blindfolded and holding her scales. Another was that of Abraham Lincoln at the Memorial in Washington. Only, as I remember, the artist had drawn the Dais empty, with Lincoln sitting woefully at the shore, chin in hands. The third, by Portuguese artist Vasco Gargalo, showed Lady Liberty holding a slingshot made of a face mask and preparing to launch none other than Donald Trump. I imagined her expressing her fury on behalf of the three:
LADY LIBERTY . . .
Bring Me your Scoundrels, your Fools; those who trample on the rules — the wretched refuse of communal life; the organizers of our Nation’s strife. Send these: the Traitors, tempest-tossed (and all their kind) to Me, and I will call my Sister, Justice, with her Scales . . . for she and I agree: they have no claim to words like Brave or Free. The covering on my Sister’s eyes represents impartiality, but underneath that cloth are tears and mourning. She carries Scales to seek, to find, to weigh the evidence — yet, when truth has died aborning . . . all too often, those who hate have made her truly blind!
Behold now: Brother Abraham has left the Dais Chair — once, his monumental throne. He sits beside the ocean’s shore with vacant, aching stare, likely thinking of his heartfelt speech at Gettysburg, the grievous war fought for the Nation’s soul, and his own untimely death. How fanciful, you say. Statues have no life, no breath! Ah, although we Three may well be made of marble, stone, or steel, our makers had the hopes appropriate to heart and flesh and bone, while the miscreants we now bemoan have suits of flesh, but hearts of stone.
Bring to Us, your liars, tax-evaders, cheats; fomenters of the public woe; those who steal, the power-mad; the vicious, petty and the mean. Let them know there is no place for them, for Our hearts beat for honest citizens, whose goal is public weal — whose consciences are clean, whose commitment to the meek, the weak, and disinherited defines a Noble Cause. This is the strength we seek, for We know true power is the source and fruit of incorruptibility.
Bring Us, then, your opportunists, toadies, hypocrites — declaring they have no regret. May We meet them with a judgment they will not soon forget!