Hard to be a moderate moderator Hard to gauge the scale In a super-sized sociopathic Algorithm-driven Hate-heated, bot-based Boiler room; Just another passing platform Soft-swooshing, hot-air-hissing Rusty, rattling Fraught follow-trains Crashing - Who doesn't love A good train wreck? Powerful loco motives Crazy-clattering Off rusted, Busted rails.
Todays Poet
Sonia Sanchez
– an American poet, writer, and professor. Sanchez was a leading writer in the Black Arts Movement who has written numerous books of poetry, short stories, critical essays, plays, and children’s books. Read more here.
Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman by Sonia Sanchez | Poetry Magazine (poetryfoundation.org)
April is National Poetry Month. This year marks its 27th year. NaPoWriMo – 30 days of writing poems – is poets’ answer to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).
This coincides with the A to Z Blogging Challenge, now celebrating its 13th anniversary. Some participants choose a theme; others wing it. Doesn’t matter! The real challenge is to build a practice of writing daily. I think I stuck with it…once. You can see the list of participants – I’m sure they’d love it if you’d visit and comment on their blogs.
This month, my goal is to:
- Write a poem a day and share it – uncurated – here; and
- Highlight some poets you may be unfamiliar with.
I encourage you to click the links to read about them and their work. I plan to choose a diverse array of classical and contemporary poets – indigenous poets, Black poets, women poets, LGBTQ poets – that challenge us to see the world differently while also tapping into universal themes and emotions.
Remember, too, that comments and conversation are always welcome here. (Spammers, on the other hand, will be tossed into the moat or mocked, so before you leave an irrelevant comment or drop a link, consider that it’s fair game!)
Love this! Great opening line because it truly is hard and a great play on words. And the voyeur in us sadly does love a good train wreck, and of course, you can read this poem on many levels and make of it what you want. You left the door open… which means you might be a pretty decent moderator after all.
That was fast! Good morning, Jill!
Thank you. I have a few decades’ experience as a moderator and have watched the evolution of social media and corresponding de-evolution of society. It’s a double-edged sword. During the past week, we traveled quite a bit by train, and the metaphor seemed clear as I wrote this – trains also serve to bring us together over great distances, but symbolize the industrial revolution that represents both advancement and separation of families and communities as we got carried away farther and faster from home.
I loved the opening, too, Jill. Also, you said all the things I wanted to say about the wordplay. 🙂
Cheers,
Mitch
I love the vision of train travel this evokes. By coincidence I’m just finishing Bill Bryson’s latest book The Road to Little Dribbling in which he mentions riding on the first railroad in the world. So your poem reminds me a bit of what one might have felt riding that old rail line.I suspect being or trying to be a moderator on social media must feel a little like watching a train wreck… Your poem also takes me back to my youth and walking the rusty rails of a defunct train line and the sadness of knowing both passenger and freight trains have not run on that route for nearly three-quarters of a century. Such a loss.
Indeed. The once brilliant, shiny innovation of the industrial revolution now relegated to a rusting hulk – you know, Europe and Asia have THRIVING railroads and passenger rail travel, today. The real shame is that we don’t.
This is a big, brash locomotive of a poem! Thundering down a track of metaphorical obsolescence! The web, indeed, the Internet, was built on a naïve foundation of open trust. Once that trust was violated, it was too late to rip up the rails and build a better infrastructure. Instead, we cobble together protocols and impediments and put the onus on the consumer of web content. Bah!
Cheers,
Mitch
You know, as I wrote this, I was thinking of the literal and the metaphorical – how timely, right? We might have avoided rail travel altogether, given the recent rail disasters, one right after another, in the US. But we figured rail travel was more common, and that both tracks and trains were probably well-maintained (well moderated) in Europe, where rail and subway travel are more common. So we took a leap of faith. And we boarded on different sides of the track for different trips – coming, going, sometimes passing so close to trains going the opposite direction that we could feel them through the sides of our own car. But there is, as you say, a lot of naïve trust involved. One of my favorite photos (and don’t judge me, but it always makes me laugh, even as it horrifies) is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montparnasse_derailment (The only fatality was some poor woman – temporarily doing her husband’s job of selling newspapers down below (there must be some metaphor in that, too, don’t you think?))
Interesting poem.
I enjoyed the one by Sanchez, as well.
Alphabet of Alphabets: S
Wasn’t that great? I’m so glad you followed the breadcrumbs, Anne. (I promise you’ll never find shady links on my site; if you do, they’ve been hijacked over time, but weren’t at all questionable when I posted them! We were just discussing this – several other friends and I, on multiple sites just this week, how the soul of the web got hijacked by spammers and scammers and sploggers and shady affiliate ad schemes. But some of us still use links to enhance information and credit others where it’s deserved.)