Category Archives: Poem

Happy (?) Birthday America!

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Women Protest Across America

 

America, Happy Birthday, you bitch.

You proud daughter of colonialism’s grand master.

 

What independence are we celebrating? Who today is free?

Last week you spat on an entire crew of ladies and on me.

Today, guns have more rights than you, me, and we.

 

Just a few years before, you threw me for a loop.

The electoral college threw democracy into a hoop.

 

So wish a happy birthday to the land of the free?

Oh say can you see, and smell the hypocrisy?

 

Your hereditary disease shows

Indeed the venom now in your spawn grows

 

I cannot forget. With weapons and disease

And cloaked in your Christianity

On sacred land, you decimated the native humanity

And in your next breath imprisoned a whole race.

 

Here today, I celebrate a failed executive coup

And mourn a successful judicial overthrow

 

The work of our mothers thrown by the wayside.

What is this place? For what do you feel pride?

 

Oh say can you see? Here, only money is free!

Get some and buy a piece of our special country.

 

With enough money,

A senator, a judge, or a lobbyist.

Throw a party, grow a position,

Enough people will drink your poison.

 

For years, two hundred and forty-six,

Your banner of red and blue hides a darker hue.

No, today I can not with the country a happy day

I cannot celebrate while so many women

Wish to live and anticipate real liberty.

Mothers Day in Three Poems

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Mother’s Day is the loudest Hallmark holiday. We were all born of the egg of some woman. But, the holiday can be hard to celebrate if you have lost a parent or have had ups and downs in your relationship. These three poems contain love, hope, and compassion for the various ways you might feel about Mom.

Gather Around Ducklings

In spring 2016, before heading off for a long road trip to the American west, I wrote this small rhyme as a dedication in a little book I gave my mother. I knew I would be away on Mother’s Day, so I intended to leave her with a smile before I hit the road.

Dear Favorite & Only Mom,

It is not yet Mother’s Day,

But still I had to say,

Very early and only today,

You have such a wonderful way!

I count my blessings

And am in luck,

YOU are my mother duck!

When I am not there, and you are blue,

Read this book, through & through.

I am stuck on you, just like glue.

When you are through,

You’ll know, I love you!

By Sabrina Hassanali

Kahlil Gibran’s book, The Prophet, has beautiful wisdom on the essentials in life. This poetic meditation for parents shares how to see children.

On Children

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

By Kahlil Gibran

Intergenerational trauma can be unwittingly carried from grandparents onto their children. The following poem I wrote after contemplating this Thich Nacht Hanh meditation on how to see a parent as a hurt child.

On Parents

People!

Parents are people too and

Full of imperfections, pimples, and pet peeves.

Punch through the core of all of that.

Pained parents push away their progeny through preparations they pour into the little pieces of their heart.

A parent’s problem,

And a child’s psychological punishments.

by Sabrina Hassanali
A Meditative Perspective

The Landless Lot

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Do you see me?
A roving mass of human forms, itinerant 
shifting from one ledge to another
outfitting corners of shelter with plastic crates
the shelves, the detritus of China's factory molds
feeding our ever growing hunger

An exsistential hole in man's rumbling, hungry stomach

The mass leaping under clouds
thundering for resolution
and our scurvy ridden human crawlers 
between crevices, moving back and forth 
as we shift onward in time

No respite under concrete bridges while
trams zoom by overhead and time
passes these vermin by

In the cold cycle of seasons 
the landless lot muffle into the snow
cherishing the root of flowers
and cooking on cement ledges

Their plight, a pleasant artificial contrast for 
their well-heeled home living comparers
Plush buttoned up purveyors of soft lit parlors
accesorised in glass ornaments 
twinkling before muted backrounds

The mass of unhomes, relearning routes
and park avenues, descending onto corners 
scraping shreds of goodwill from an indifferent human flow
Trickling into gambling houses and pouring into empty seats
chancing their last 100 yen for a game with no end