1.
Putin! Putin!
There’s really no disputin’!
You’re a liar and a louse
And you look like a mouse!
Get out of our House!
This House we call “Earth”!
That’s ours from our birth!
Don’t kill the babies
With your kind of rabies!
We’ve been thru this before—
This plague we call “War”!
The generals praise…
While Earth rots and decays!
The children are crying…
While their parents are dying!
Can you hear? Do you dare?
Get off your high horse!
Get down in the mud
With the stink and the blood!
Talk’s better than force!
No dream of yore
Is worth all the gore!
Who made you Czar?
The thought is bizarre!
Not only you,
But the whole primping crew—
In your land, their land…
“Their land” and “mine”
They can’t seem to shine
A light in the mine
For children to follow!
Are we really so hollow?
Are we really so crass—
With aplomb up our ass?
Tolstoy, Chekhov, Mandelstam, Keats,
Akhmatova, Shakespeare, Tagore and Yeats,
Lao Tzu and Owen, Dickinson, Frost…
And so many more
Cry thru the ages:
“Not to get lost!
Follow the sages:
End endless War!”
2.
Putin! Putin!
No more disputin’!
The plank in our eyes
Won’t help us disguise
The splinters in others’
We sometimes call “brothers.”
7 decades and more
After nuclear gore
And we couldn’t imagine
A world without war!
We also lied
For the sake of the Throne
We claimed as our own—
The Power to Judge
Who lived and who died!
It’s time to move on!
For all children’s sake—
Grow up and move on.
Forever forsake
The Cancer of War!
Gary Steven Corseri is the grandson of Ukrainian-Jewish and Sicilian-Catholic immigrants. He has performed his poems at the Carter Presidential Library and his dramas have been produced on PBS-Atlanta and in universities, high schools and Little Theaters. He has published 2 novels, 1 full collection and 1 prize-winning chapbook of poems. His poems, articles, fiction and dramas have appeared in hundreds of global publications & websites, including: Countercurrents, Redbook Magazine, Village Voice, The Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, and Transcend Media Service. He has taught at universities in the U.S. and Japan, and in US prisons and public schools. He has worked as a grape-picker in Australia, a gas-station attendant, and an editor.
