When I was young, my neighbors thought
Most politicians could be bought.
The few exceptions to these rules
Were simply seen as naive fools.

So long as we had safe, clean streets
And lots of cops to walk our beats,
A little larceny was fine
And purging graft seemed asinine.

At least it seemed that way each fall
So long as we held City Hall.
But once those others won the votes
Our leaders sounded different notes.

Their politicians were all crooks,
Embezzling funds and cooking books,
A shocking lack of rectitude
(Especially to the new born prude).

Morality is flexible—
What’s right and wrong and ethical—
But tribal loyalty endures
Protecting me and mine from yours.

Maurice O’Sullivan, a former teamster, jail guard and pub owner, is an award-winning teacher, editor, columnist, and film maker who lives in Orlando, Florida. His most recent book, Have You Not Hard of Floryda, is a survey of 300 years of Florida’s colonial literature.

They point away from where I’m jogging to
as I lean head down straight into the gale
as if against it. Just exactly who
I think I am, they seem to know, these frail
cat stalks and blades, cotton-pods, shreds
and tufts of which, kachooed across the path,
bank along neglected flower beds.
Pushing on in all this aftermath
of hot green afternoons that now survive
as memories of grass and sun and song
and everything unthinkingly alive,
this is my one way left of being strong
and I will argue it against the wind
in stride, and striving, and undisciplined.

Terence Culleton is a former Bucks County (PA) Poet Laureate, a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee, and recipient of First Honorable Mention in the 2019 Helen Schaible International Traditional Sonnet Contest. Terence has published two collections of formally crafted narrative and lyric poems, A Communion of Saints (2011) and Eternal Life (2015), both with Anaphora Literary Press. Poems from his forthcoming collection of sonnets, A Tree and Gone (FutureCycle Press), have recently appeared in Antiphon, The Lyric, The Eclectic Muse, Innisfree, The Road Not Taken (including Feature Poem), Blue Unicorn Review, and Raintown Review. 

His days are done and nights have claimed his breath,
As crickets lull truncated lives to rest;
His fragile dreams now fled were never blessed
But may he find eternal life in death.

The flowers grow and wither year by year,
And thorny stalks then grace this ground in awe;
Whose deep endearment dare invite the thaw?
Where every bead of snow’s a frozen tear.

The gravestone reads, ‘The songs of heart will die,
The feelings come to mould, and love to dust;
A sole, unwilling sigh to bid goodbye
Can wreck my pleasant sleep beneath the crust.

If someone’s loss reminds him, words betray,
Unread his book of fame can’t add a page;
My dormant lines won’t ever let him stray,
And soothe the blows of fortune’s deadly rage.’

There lies his tombstone marred by disregard,
While dappled moonlight shines upon the bard.

Satyananda Sarangi is a young civil servant by profession. A graduate in electrical engineering from IGIT Sarang, his works have been featured in The Society of Classical Poets, Snakeskin, Page & Spine, Glass: Facets of Poetry, WestWard Quarterly, The GreenSilk Journal and elsewhere. Currently, he resides in Odisha, India.