Trumpet of the Coming Storm

Everybody talks about the weather, or so we’re told, except when it involves politics or religion. But listen up – the coming storm includes both, and everybody’s at risk.
Sounding an alarm above ongoing daily clatter, the poems in this raging diatribe connect the now incontestable global warming otherwise known as climatic instability to America’s increasingly poisonous political and social polarization and to the widening gap between the superrich and the remaining 99 percent of the people, among a host of other ominous factors.
Many of these blasts of distress originate in my private seething under the muzzling code of professional journalism, at least as practiced by what was being derided by reactionaries as “liberal journalism” while I labored against rising mass delusion and psychological denial regarding escalating deterioration and injustice in American and global affairs. Just face the facts, OK? Not the escapist fantasies.
For three decades, I had a unique seat for observing these developments. Every four years, New Hampshire’s deep winter cold became the testing ground for the rival campaigns of the crucial first-in-the-nation presidential primary. At a perch inside the state’s largest newspaper, amid the convergence of intense political jockeying, I sensed much that kept eluding the national spotlight, along with malignant consequences that have kept swelling in the silence.
At last, retired from the pressing headlines and obituaries and unshackled from the constraints of objective neutrality, my long-buried anger surged into the overtly political rants presented here, so different from my other poetry.
With so much else teetering on the precipice, these pieces emerge multilayered, spontaneous, expressive, sophomoric, incantatory, prophetic, even droll as a manifesto for public awakening.
As the book of Joel proclaims, “Blow the trumpet … sound the alarm on my holy hill,” that the people might be spared. So listen up, then. Please. And take heed.