Waxing poetic on politics

Connie at Planet of the Blind wants the whole class to write Haiku to Bush. So Snag offered this little gem:

There's blood on the ground
For sweet sweet crude in the well
Let's all go shopping!

In what has now become a popular prose poem, blogger Lance Mannion concocts a metaphor to explain the contemporary Republican style of governance.

If the Government is a car setting out to give every one a ride to work, then for 40 years the Republicans have been puncturing the tires, pouring sand in the gas tank, stealing the distributer cap, and, whenever they can get their hands on the wheel, driving it straight into the nearest ditch and then, pointing to the wreckage as the tow truck backs up to it, saying, See, this proves that people were meant to walk.

And they do this so that they don't have to chip in on gas.

In the critic's quarter, Warwick Collins at Public Poems asks, “Can Obama write?” He also examines Barack Obama's early poems.

Perhaps Jon Garfunkel hasn't heard about those Obama verses, since he's lamenting that not only are campaigns are not using their blogging tools properly, but “Presidential candidates still don't write poems, either.” And he calls for change with

A little poem now and then,
Would help us all remember
That as the pieces vow and fend,
There is a world beyond November.

It must be something in the air, because Hillary Clinton has said that Obama's oratory is like poetry — though she didn't intend it to be complementary; Bill used “fairy tale” in similar fashion. (Others contend that some of Obama's autobiographical books have involved considerable literary license.)

Not that Hill and Bill have anything against the art form, since last summer, Maya Angelou gave her poetic nod to Hillary.

Meanwhile, wars military and political rage on, and the poets continue to weep and write.