Bev Tappan

Category: Social Justice and Democracy Poems

Do the right thing people!

  • HOUSEWORK

    Here he is high on a ladder
    Painting my condo’s window sash
    Brown skin and black mustache
    Minimum wage immigrants:
    Those we need for all those tasks
    Too toilsome for our middle class.
    Oh I, too once stood on ladders
    Nailing cedar logs to beams
    Helping my husband shape our dreams.
    But we were salaried entrepreneurs
    White, entitled, college grads
    Blind to what privilege we had.

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: CALL TO THE COLORS

    CALL TO THE COLORS

    (An Ode to Racists)

    How dispiriting are all-white bouquets

    Compared to colorful flower displays.

    How unappealing the all-white plate

    (Of cauliflower, rice and fish) to our palates.

    Albino animals we don’t think pretty.

    We consider them odd; they excite our pity.

    Why then do we struggle and plot and connive

    To be an all-white, pasty-faced, anemic tribe?

    I put this query to ardent racists

    Who hate the sight of different faces

    And want an exclusive society

    With no interesting variety.

    Let’s chord the song, let’s add new notes.

    Who knows?  We might even like these folks.

     

     

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: FREAK SHOW

    Why do we sit in our circus seats

    Watching a shaggy yellow-haired ape

    Swagger and strut his pompous stuff?

    Hear all the dissonant noise he makes!

    Does he mean us harm?  Is that a stick

    Of dynamite or is it sugar cane?

    And is that a cigarette lighter

    His other hand points and waves

    At us?  Why don’t we boo and hiss

    Until they drag him off the stage?

    We like to play with fire.  We love

    To tempt the bull, wave the red cape,

    Run our outdated nuclear reactors,

    Ignore the winds of a blackening hurricane.

      

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: KING KONG

    KING KONG

     

    A killer ape is loose

    On the Capitol steps.

    He pounds his chest and hoots

    Enigmatical threats

    As yet no one dares to cage

    This hysterical beast

    Who seems determined to wage

    Full scale war in the East.

    We are mesmerized by his show

    Of hyperbolic menace,

    Too lacking in foresight to know

    We may later do penance

    When millions of lives are consumed

    In nuclear blasts

    And our habitat is ruined

    By radiant aftermath.

     

     

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: AT THE ACADEMY CONCERT

    AT THE ACADEMY CONCERT

    Last night we heard Beethoven’s

    “War and Peace” sonata

    (Or so I choose to call it):

    Brief interludes of harmony

    Give way to the clash of arms.

    And then the “Blitzkrieg Waltz”

    (Though he himself denies it):

    The dimly heard Valse by Ravel

    Drowned out by war’s alarums.

    It seems this new generation

    Of promising high school students

    Does not expect peace in their time.

    And those of us in our nineties

    Suspect that they are right.

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: THE PILLARS

    THE PILLARS

    (ON A PROPOSED LOBBY RENOVATION)

    THE PILLARS ARE APPALLING:

    SIGHT-IMPEDING,

    WALK-BLOCKING,

    TALK-DEFEATING,

    SPACE-CONSUMING,

    HOTEL-LOOKING,

    STRICT AND LOOMING,

    IF THERE’S ONE THING WE DON’T NEED,

    IT’S THINGS THAT COME BETWEEN.

     

  • AT HOME: A GIFT OF LAND

    Olof, the hale old Swede who cleared this hill,
    Tossing an avalanche of fieldstones down the draw
    When these tall cedar trees were bluegray berries,
    Cut wagonloads of black birch to be milled
    For wintergreen to oil less supple joints,
    Pastured his dairy cows where we now play
    At carpenter and mason after work,
    Gathered snowy mounds of princess ppine
    For Ingrid his wife to weave in yuletime weaths
    And picking marigolds for marshy salads
    Paced on glacier droppings over wetlands
    He rightly guessed could be gouged to a pond,
    Rode with us to scan a gravel bank
    For gleanings of choice rainwashed building stones.

    We asked the owner what she’d take for them.
    She said she’d be obliged if we would come
    And help ourselves to what were hard to move.
    Rocks, being common, were as free as air.
    Her mother was an Indian, said Olof
    When we thanked her. Came from Signal Hill.
    Her father was a white, her husband too
    And only one of her six kids was Indian.
    That one’s a teacher now, a real nice girl.
    No Indians are left now on the reservation.
    You have to be full blooded to live there.

    We did not speak but thought, the town
    Has finally become desegregated, then,
    And Asiatic faces, warm brown skins
    Have mingled with us northern Europeans.
    You do not seem to mind and yet you sat
    One recent evening scowling over coffee
    Indignant at some legislative pup
    Who dared propose that blacks should dwell near whites
    If they could pay the price, dollars being green.
    “They all smell bad,” you said, “and I’d not want
    My daughters to get near them nor would I.
    They’ll buy a house and fill it full of kith
    And kin whose kids will overrun the neighborhood
    And all the houses will be sold to them.”

    We wonder, Olof, what you’d say if you
    Were living now, twenty years later when
    It begins to look as though the Reservation
    Will soon outgrow the town. With government grants
    The Indians have built new houses, purchased land,
    Bought out a restaurant, developed a gravel mine,
    And opened up a high stakes bingo hall.
    Meanwhile, the blacks are still not numerous among us.
    What is the difference whether the skins of neighbors
    Are black or brown or white except for the guilt
    That we once took their lands away from the Indians
    And from their lands we took away the Africans.

  • FAMILY: WOMEN’S WORK

    Bluebirds windchiming in the Jeffrey pines
    Make background music as I hook up
    From beneath the burlap white and yellow
    Petals of lotus flowers. Conifers
    Spread green fingers in the sun.

    In Egypt, land of lotus and papyrus,
    Nomadic women day to day
    Weave goatskin pads they stitch
    Into tent sidings, one forever
    Needing replacement. But Hetup-heres,
    Daughter, wife, and mother of pharoahs,

    Rested slender fingers on graceful
    Arms of carved and gilded chairs:
    Borne above the dust by slaves
    And Hatshepsut grasped the crook and flail,
    Herself donning the pharoah’s beard.

    In 1986 Before Christ,
    A scribe advised his son, “Do not
    Become a weaver. They sit all day
    In the house at their looms unhappy as women.”
    My daughters the engineer, the supervisor and
    The shop owner are making their choices.

  • AT THE TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER

    (First published in Lip Service Magazine, Spring/Fall 1987)

    Heals click like gunshots
    As the uniformed robot with shaved head
    Turns. White gloves swat
    The rifle from shoulder to shoulder, which form
    The top line of the blue trapezoid
    Based on a twenty-nine inch waist.

    He duckwalks thirty paces
    North and thirty paces south.
    Day and night he guards the grave
    Of four whom nothing can hurt anymore.

    As he salutes, his clockwork arms at five
    Minutes to midnight, he overlooks beyond
    The tomb the obelisk and dome and all
    The pillared Roman monuments to power.

    Less than forty years from now,
    They tell us, Arlington Cemetery will be full.
    Where shall we then bury our unknowns?
    They’re running a final solution contest.

    The winning missiles, swarming like asteroids,
    Will broadcast the ashes of nameless millions,
    Mingled with marble dust, throughout
    The capitol city sarcophagus
    Leaving four heat-etched silhouettes
    On billboards of government walls
    To be greeted decades later by some
    Lumbering radiation-suited sergeant
    Raising a bulky mitted hand.