poem
Volume 33, Number 3

Loyalists Now Dead

Yes, their offices,
powers, love of force,
their greenback gardens,
their orchard lucre…
but they sloshed in blood
shallows, hard-headed
they trucked through red mud
carpets of their will-
ful policies—Ford’s own
“loyalists” from his
Nixon days: Bush One,
Cheney, Kissinger,
Rumsfeld, Westmoreland,
and lackeys thereof.
These men ruled, shamed, and
deviled, us and dead,
still do—harbingers
of later harm—not
punished, still admired
by the worst of us.
They produced their own
thick fog of warring.
Where they had not yet
produced sufficient
ruin, they pushed to
destroy more, with—or
even, one should say,
on—Bush Two. For him
and for them, too, no
bad consequences:
consequences were
for hapless others.
Those who could not stop
these men, or who chose
not to oppose them,
may see behind them
their failures, their tracks.
Loyalists voided,
wounded, sickened, or
annihilated,
all whom they had com-
manded to be killed
and those commanded
to kill—so many
wrecked, then neglected,
abandoned on streets …
Nor did honest words
or truthful charges
against them ever
shame these loyalists
and their followers,
or effectively
counter their views or
recompense—but how?—
one can’t raise the dead
victims. No one led
the loyalists to
atone for any-
thing. They made their new
America a
Heimat. ( “Salute it!”)
These politicos
infected many
fellow citizens
with their virulent
mistakenness—their
dire zoonotic
virus that compelled
subordinates to
fulfill the killing.
Their public statements
so often dripped a
poisonous thought-froth.
And in Florida,
some helped purloin the
votes they sought or bought
for their pol-puppy:
they went home happy.
All five of them stayed
busy with their pals,
as—successfully,
assiduously—
they fully whitened,
by degrees, the teeth
of their own careers.


—Reginald Gibbons