Everyone wants peace, but votes for hawks.
A senator holds forth to an empty chamber.
No one listens. Everybody talks

conspiracies and outrage. Voting blocs
preserve their seamless fronts, and by November,
everyone wants peace, but votes for hawks.

I shoot my mouth off, and you shoot your Glocks.
Statesmen make deals they later can’t remember.
No one listens. Everybody talks

in slogans sold on T-shirts. Hackers doxx
judges whose moral codes are less than limber.
Everyone wants peace, but votes for hawks.

Act your rage, they tell you. Ragnarok’s
coming your way, to light you up like timber.
No one listens. Everybody talks

as midnight’s ticking closer on the clocks.
We’re parties of one, and one’s a lonely number.
Everyone wants peace, but votes for hawks.
No one listens. Everybody talks.

*****

Echo Chamber was originally published in Rattle‘s Poets Respond.

Susan McLean writes: “The original idea for the poem came when I heard about a senator addressing an empty chamber in Congress. I commented “No one listens. Everybody talks.” It occurred to me then that that would make a good repetend in a villanelle. As I worked on writing it, my feelings about other recent events influenced the direction the poem took. As I wrote in Poets Respond, “It wasn’t one story this week that inspired this poem, but a confluence of events: the proposed invasion of Gaza by Israel, the wildfires all over the U.S. and Canada, the lone shooter trying to register his outrage by killing people at the CDC, the Democrats fleeing Texas in an effort to prevent redistricting. It all felt apocalyptic and Wagnerian to me.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “Blah Blah Blah” by id-iom is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.