Silence & Hope

A Poetic Manifesto to Speak Out in Metaphor

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How to express outrage?

Rant? Cry? Sulk?

Or write poetry?

The anthology Silence is Consent opens with a quote from American poet and activist Amanda Gorman: "Poetry has consistently been the language of a people. I think it's the reason why, when there's protest, you will hear metaphor. You will hear they buried us, but they didn't know we were seeds. The reason that there's a poem and not a 36-page essay at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty, when we are trying, as a people, to speak to our best shared common humanity, typically, poetry is the rhetoric that encapsulates that the best."

Edited by Christopher Bogart, Silence is Consent includes over 80 poets across America plus a “A Poetic Manifesto,” which notes: “We must speak out against the lies, the fears, and the demonization of ‘others.’ In short, we must speak to as well as for, the truth.” Bogart, a poet who resides in Monmouth County, NJ, said proceeds from this anthology will be sent to ACLU.

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Consider Austin Alexis’s “Hope,” one of the poems featured in this anthology.
What do you think of his metaphor of a chaotic amusement park?
What do you think about poetry as an act of resistance?

Hope

In this time of vertigo, 
        this rollercoaster of reversals
        and detours and dangerous tilts
and spotty inspections
and lack of regulations
       and unqualified operators,
how do we stay balanced?
How do we hold our own
in this fiendish competition
in which the game is rigged, 
the courts do nonsense summersaults, 
and Congress feigns confusion 
caused by clownish cartwheels?

We grip tight to faith
that the chaotic amusement park 
will suffer a blackout: hyper electricity will go kaput,
teetering Ferris wheels will halt
and the stuttering popcorn machines 
       will silence themselves     and stall. 
Equilibrium restored at last!
Then, in addition to popcorn, 
real food will be secured and served
by the people,
of the people, 
for the people.