|
“White
Lies”
(or: Poem for July 4, 2026)
Who decided the term “white lie”
would suggest a falsehood that's
benign?
Perhaps, I am thinking, it was one
of those white liars
at the moment they first decided
back in the summer of 1776
that the outright theft of land
and labor from human beings whose skin
happens to be some other color
might henceforth be referred to
as “liberty and justice
for all.”
The next time you hear this claim,
or any other
of their big “white lies,”
allow me to suggest
that you spend a few moments
contemplating what we might,
in retrospect, identify
as a more honest definition
for those two words.
Steve Bloom
December 2025
Tuxedo
It is, surely, not one
of my life's greatest achievements.
Yet I do think of it with pride:
I have never, not once,
worn a tuxedo.
And the number of times
you might have found me in a suit
can be counted on the fingers
of a single hand.
I am not the clothes I wear.
I am also not the car I drive,
nor the size of the house I live in.
I am not the amount of money I may have
stashed away somewhere.
Nor the number of my followers
on social media—
not even the poetry contests I have
won
(or didn't, since I choose
never to enter poetry contests).
What am I, then?
Read, with sufficient attention,
these and other lines I have written.
The answer, I believe you will find,
is lurking there.
Steve Bloom
December 2025
More
poems by Steve Bloom
|
