Glossolalia

“We have languages coming into our country that no one can speak.”—Donald Trump

"This one has a plan, and it's already applauded. . . . This one wants to be longing, opens and bites it."—Alcides Villaça, "Esses poetas"*

Explain this is what he asked:

“how allowing millions of people

from places unknown, from countries

unknown, who don’t speak languages

— we have languages

coming into our country, we

have nobody that even speaks

those languages. They are truly

foreign languages. Nobody speaks

them.”

"If Trump were your relative, you’d

be thinking about assisted care

right now."**

*Header image poem: https://www.tudoepoema.com.br/alcides-villaca-esses-poetas/

**https://www.salon.com/2024/03/07/dr-john-gartner-the-world-is-watching-a-fundamental-breakdown-in-trumps-ability-to-use-language/

Barracoon

Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819)

Ocean that soaks me to the bone

Uphold me, for I cannot sleep

And a perplexèd thing thus peep

In early morning at my phone.

Gazing hopeful, remote the bight,

Raft this shipwrecked barracoon,*

I fool myself that one day—soon

Some happy view might heave in sight.

Protectress Gorgo, turn to stone

The blind who ravage Earth in play —

Reboot your venging stare today,

Redeem the road the moguls roam!

She is not here. But far away

The noise of wreck begins again,

And awful through the icy rain

On dying ocean breaks the day.**

*Barracoon = a slave pen or enclosure, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracoon; see [Sir] V. S. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon, reviewed by Peter Dreyer in The San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, April 22, 1973.

**A respectful nod to Lord Tennyson's great poem In Memoriam for this shameless purloining of phrasing and metre. "If you must steal, steal from the best, who can well afford it."

Pinko-Beige, or, Angiosperm Power

"The remark that did him most harm at the club was a silly aside to the effect that the so-called white races are really pinko-grey.”—E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)

If I were brown I might think of myself as “black”;

But I am “white”; I don’t think of me as that.

A century ago Morgan Forster supposed himself “pinko-grey,”*

But I’m rather on the “pinko-beige-ish” side, I’d say.

It matters little now in any case

Since we’re all soon headed for the other place,

And human shades will there be less than classic—

We might as well have bloomed in the Jurassic!

Notes

Charles Darwin called the sudden appearance of the Angiospermae, or flowering plants, a 100 million years ago in the Jurassic era  “an abominable mystery” (https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55769269).

“Beige is variously described as a pale sandy fawn color, a grayish tan, a light-grayish yellowish brown, or a pale to grayish yellow. It takes its name from French, where the word originally meant natural wool that has been neither bleached nor dyed” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beige).