day FOURTEEN HUNDRED and FIFTEEN

WRETCHED AND LESS SO AMONG US [5+]

1. Phaeton’s Fate

-- thanks to Walter Brooks’ Freddy The Pig Goes To Florida, 1949
and Naomi Fry’s Basic Instincts, New Yorker, 16November2020

Lulled by such monotonous
patter on satin carriage’s
gilded umbrella roof

rich housewife & man dither
to care for other mothers’
kids of poverty while they

preserve their safe distance
through what C. Dickens
sarcastically labelled

“telescopic philanthropy”
of boss-ladies or gents’
slick televisual clichés

as the Corona’s death rattle
prattle grows to more than
this horrible dull roar war.

--Gerard Sarnat

Gerard Sarnat won San Francisco Poetry’s 2020 Contest, the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for handfuls of recent Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry is widely published including in Buddhist Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, Northampton Review, New Haven Poetry Institute, Texas Review, Vonnegut Journal, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, and The New York Times as well as by Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Penn, Chicago and Columbia presses. He’s authored the collections Homeless Chronicles (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014), Melting the Ice King (2016). Gerry is a physician who’s built and staffed clinics for the marginalized as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. Currently he is devoting energy/ resources to deal with climate justice, and serves on Climate Action Now’s board. Gerry’s been married since 1969 with three kids plus six grandsons, and is looking forward to future granddaughters.