Thank you, Nick Allison and Rachel Armes-McLaughlin, for accepting my poems for The Chaos Section Poetry Project anthology Uprooted: Poems of Resistance, Witness, and Survival.
Nick and Rachel said they would be posting poems from the anthology on The Chaos Section Poetry Project (CSPP) blog. Today, they published one of my poems, “Sonnet for the Untitled.”
On CSPP’s site, I commented:
Given the recent unvetted felling of trees on the Washington, D.C., golf course (part of our National Park System), this poem feels timely. It refers to the felling of the famous Jackson Magnolia on the White House property. The White House is the People’s House and also part of the National Park System.
My poem is mainly about the “untitled,” who are listed in the poem.
Sonnet for the Untitled
This isn’t a sonnet about gold-leafed mantels
lined with stolen trophies. It’s about our grannies,
crocheting mantles of our legacies. This is a sonnet
for the Jackson Magnolia. Its demise provides space
for a vast golden ballroom fashioned for the fake king.
This sonnet isn’t for that great pretender.
This is a sonnet about underage girls exploited
by power and privilege. It’s about the injured.
The disabled. The murdered. The brown. The black.
The truthsayers. The exiled laborers. All those
‘disappeared’. Denied. All those torn from their cribs—
naked, shackled toddlers. It’s for Good and Pretti.
This isn’t a sonnet about the unspined.
It’s about the unsung. All those maligned.
© Barbara Harris Leonhard
Although you can download this anthology for free, you can also purchase it on Amazon.
This is my post introducing the anthology
Uprooted: Poems of Resistance, Witness, and Survival.
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