The objection to the poet
in a form
suggests a mind unborn,
embryonic,
dystonic,
dysfunctional
and unfinished,
kneaded like a dough but half-baked before rising--
and that's unsurprising.
The general stance of the book bans
is a celebration of ignorance
and a quarantine from the contamination
of mental exercise and elaboration--
the fear of an excitation of
sympathetic responses and
personal expansion of the mind:
which I find poetry has the power to do.
The bubble parent wants a bubble child--
a sphere so clear yet fragile
to the wild
notion of the experience of
other skins
and other lives,
and wilts at difference instead of thrives.
They want not a world, but a womb,
to protect an unfinished mind
but they finish it with a tomb
because who can find
a future where avenues of struggle and strangeness
aren't confronted?
The journey of a hero shunted to the journey
of a child, from playpen to playpen,
building up blocks as one does,
and knocking them down again.
I can barely imagine
the foul strangling harpy,
her talons clutched round her offspring's neck
who would so faintly damn an infant mind
to a brutal life-in-death
intellectual heck.
Bereft of the muses, perpetually unamused,
blinkered and blinded,
politically confused,
the target of propaganda,
calumny and grift,
alienated from humanity and
caught in a rift--
this Sheila Scylla, this Cracker Karen,
maybe it were better to
be wholly barren, than to
wipe the landscape clean for the child you farrowed.
an innocent today--
perhaps a monster tomorrow.
(From the objection to Amanda Gorman in a Florida school district by a whole ass fool. And the school district agreed?)
