The End and the Beginning

By Wisława Szymborska

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop

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Too Late The Truth

​Haki R. Madhubuti

who quieted the fourth estate,

took words, images, and liberating ideas

from the recently comatosed and stole the nation?

why was there not a storm among us

confronting the wealth of ignorance?

what is the price of deceptive and enriched silence?

who compromised the music of truth,

the poetry of deep thought?

what of th

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Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain—

All, all the stretch of these great green states—

And make America again!