The Limerick I’d Love to Write

by Joe Tessitore

There once was a President Trump
And many thought he was a chump.
____But none was more shrewd
____Than this big-city dude,
Now back over his wall they must jump!

Joe Tessitore is a retired New York City resident and poet.

 

Trump I

by Damian Robin

As though unstressed—a daylight peeping bat
With forceful, viral, odd, quick-minded tweets—
He thins down words, pings aces from a hat,
Distracts to win what first seemed failed deceits.

This Emp’ror’s style is not a diplomat’s;
He’s front rank of all communist annoyers;
He wears down carpets under plutocrats
And fills out briefs and overcoats of lawyers.

Though enemies would have his good waylaid
Or wish his golden fortunes to decline—
All those with faith in karma being paid,
Or crediting Intelligent Design,
Cannot, in all right-mindedness, evade—
That though his ways are wild—his work’s divine!

 

What It Takes to Drain a Swamp

by Evan Mantyk (after John Smith)

When Donald J. Trump stepped off the stump
America grew great again,
But even his romps through DC swamps
could barely purge those men—

That menagerie of depravity:
The slimy copperheads,
The creepy crawlies and crocadollies
Who sleep in murky beds.

If we get Trump to man the pump
In eight years it will drain
The bureaucrats, whose lies fill vats—
Just faintly leave a stain.

 

Great for Democracy

by John Smith

Speaker Nancy Pelosi owns Ilhan Omar, AOC
And Rashida Tlaib; three just dyin’-to-be jihadis.
Add Schiffless Adam and his paddler Nadler,
Two anti-semite semites who’d far rather
Phish for Trump than wish for something great for democracy.

John Smith is a Vietnam vet living in Illinois.  He was born in 1942 in California and is an alumnus of Northwestern University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

 

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The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary.


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22 Responses

  1. Joseph S. Salemi

    God bless President Trump. And may God keep him in good health as our leader for another four years.

    Just look at the verminous scum who are running for the Democrat nomination, and tremble at what the alternative to President Trump would be.

    Reply
  2. Sally Cook

    Dear Joe —
    You are on the right track!

    I knew Trump would or could win even before he declared. I recently wrote to him, asking him to do something federal to render useless any vote to give illegals (not “immigrants”, who are ok with me if they are legal) driver’s licenses. This law in NYS pushed by downstate radicals would effectively nullify our upstate votes. I believe he will do it; not because of my query, but because it is the right thing to do.

    That’s what Trump is all about — doing the right thing, morally and ideologically.

    Reply
  3. Roy E. Peterson

    HAPPY BIRTHDAY PRESIDENT TRUMP

    When in the course of human events
    People elect a few great Presidents,
    Like Donald Trump, who’s under such strain
    To make our country great once again,
    We must be willing to stand and fight
    Alongside him for things that are right.

    You’re shackled by an obdurate left;
    Ones who would leave our country bereft;
    A party of treason, dolts and thieves;
    Ones in whom only a fool believes.
    Yet, you fight on in spite of them all,
    Saving our country its greatest fall.

    I know June 14th is your birthday.
    Thank you again for leading the way.
    My gift to you should be a flak jacket,
    Earplugs to shield you from the racket,
    Internment for our state enemy,
    Gratitude from all in our country.

    Reply
  4. Rebecca P Jessup

    Hair of orangutan, voice of a loon,
    roughly the age of the man in the moon,
    as brave as a frog, and just as good-looking,
    while his closest associates Dan-O is booking!

    The planet we love, he’ll just leave it to burn,
    and turn up the heat for the bucks he may earn,
    ’cause no laws of physics he bothered to learn.
    And no way will he ever show his tax return.

    Scandals? Ignore ’em. Laws? Do the same.
    Congress? The Senate? The press? All are lame.
    If they don’t praise his ego, they’re surely to blame
    for anything that could topple his game.

    And his game is golf, every week, all the time
    as long as the club is his own, on our dime;
    we taxpayers pay for his every vacation,
    while he undoes the core and the laws of our nation.

    His fans, they adore him. We lefties are stupid,
    they say, but it’s they who are loopid,
    repeating the same mistakes time and again.
    Fool me twice, shame on me — but they’re up to ten.

    Reply
      • Rebecca P Jessup

        The meter, sir, is dactyllic dimeter, which slips into trimeter in the second stanza. And although I’m a little more broad than I was when I was younger, I’m not A broad. Nor am I abroad, although this administration makes that look more tempting all the time. Thanks so much for your cogent response, as well thought out as his policies.

  5. Joseph S. Salemi

    Get your tit out of the wringer, Becky. First off, you opening quatrain is in a four-stress meter, so it cannot be “dimeter.”

    HAIR of orANGutan, VOICE of a LOON

    Those are three dactyls, following by a single stress.

    If you’re tempted to go abroad permanently, try Sweden, Cuba, North Korea, or Venezuela. I’m sure they’d all be to your taste.

    Reply
    • Rebecca P Jessup

      HAIR of oRANGutan, VOICE of a LOON —

      You are RIGHT!, 3 dactyls, and a final stressed syllable. My mistake. And I grant you that the meter is sometimes weak.

      There is a vast difference between Sweden and North Korea — and I don’t mean geographically. The secrecy around North Korea is a near-total blackout, so all we can know is what we learn from those few who escape. It sounds like a living hell. (Ref: The Orphan Master’s Son: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orphan_Master%27s_Son )
      Sweden, on the other hand, is an extremely healthy nation. My nephew has lived there for years. They have better education, longer life expectancy, universal health coverage, FAR less violent crime, lower infant mortality. Yes, and they pay high taxes and thus have lower, but adequate, take-home pay. They have much more free time, and much less of a class divide than we have here. (They don’t have gazillionaires, although they have enough capitalistic ambition to have given the world Ikea and the Volvo, inter alia.) Their attitude toward global warming is grounded in science, and they work actively on reducing pollution on a number of fronts. They don’t have an enormous military budget, and they don’t start or participate in wars, for the most part. They are having to close some of their prisons because they don’t have that many prisoners. Their climate is no rougher than mine, in Maine. I am an American, born here, have always lived here and probably always will — but really, what is so awful about how Sweden works?

      Reply
      • Evan Mantyk

        We just had a family staying with us from Sweden. Everything works fine on the surface but they say that there is a very depressing and dark undercurrent. People feel trapped. They also feel that their culture has been drained and they have lost their freedom. Any talk of God can get you in trouble. The problems are there festering and getting worse because of socialism. Sweden is not a model. Social problems, which all societies have, only have one solution there, more laws, more socialism, more mindless bureaucracy. Socialism is by its nature the first step toward communism. They get sick of the people who can’t shake God and traditional views and they take out their problems on them. Go to China. Live there. That is socialism.

      • Rebecca P Jessup

        In my nephew’s experience, there’s a long church tradition in Sweden, and it isn’t dying out any faster than traditional churches are tending to die out here — which is steadily and increasingly. No one is punished or looked down on for going to church in Sweden that I’ve heard of. There’s also a small but strong masonic presence, which is religious as well as civic. As for depression, northern climates where there is little sunlight for many months tend to have higher rates of depression. I don’t know that socialism has had any effect on that. I live in Maine, and we see some of that here. Denmark usually ranks as the happiest nation in the world, and they are definitely socialists.
        I am not trying to insult anyone who sees things in a different light. I would hope that dialogues across political / social lines can be kept civil and rational.

      • C.B. Anderson

        Let’s not forget, fool, that Stockholm is now the rape capitol of the world, due to the influx of Muslim men from all over the world.

    • Rebecca Jessup

      I suspect that the “free speech” which is not covered would be hate speech. Terms like “the N word”, or anything that would qualify as hate speech by the standards of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

      I’m somewhat familiar with The American Thinker. I have a friend who has been pretty active there at times. Amici, we are not going to change each other’s minds or world views. I have sent some of Dr Salemi’s material to my nephew, who loves Sweden and is in the long, slow process of gaining Swedish citizenship, having lived and worked there for maybe seven years now. If he wants to respond, either he or I will post it here. Otherwise, we have come to a parting of the ways.

      I am a Latin teacher, and I have taught classical poetry, including Vergil, Horace, and Ovid, inter alia. Further, my mother held Shakespeare readings in our house every summer and often in the winter, so I have been exposed to a lot of classical poetry, and love it dearly. I was very happy to find a website with a name like Classical Poets. I had no idea it would be so political.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Rebecca —

        You politicized this thread by adding a poem that attacked the President. Then you started a big thing about about how wonderful Sweden is. When some of us replied, you then threatened to bring in your nephew’s testimony and post it here.

        So tell us plainly — who’s the one causing political turmoil and disputation? When you say that, concerning the SCP, you “had no idea it would be so political,” you are making clear your unconscious assumption that if conservatives dare to speak up in defense of their views, it’s in some way politically criminal, and certainly unheard-of.

      • Rebecca Jessup

        As I said earlier, I had no idea when I posted the poem about DJT that I was in an environment where it would create such a negative response. I have sent it to a number of my friends, who all got a good laugh from it and thanked me. I really did not mean to thrown blood into shark-infested water. (That’s a metaphor; I don’t mean that conservatives are sharks.)
        I did not bring up Sweden. Dr S., you suggested (after telling me to pull my tits out of the wringer, to which I did not reply) that I’d be happier in North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela or Sweden. I then tried (A) to point out that those countries are very different from each other, and (B) to defend Sweden, which I believe has certain advantages over the USA. Not that it’s all better over there across the boards (I haven’t been there myself since the early 1970s). I have tried to remain civil and fact-based. I don’t at all object to conservatives defending their POV, and I would have expected no less if I had posted on the American Thinker. As I’ve already said, I just didn’t know the nature of this group. I am sorry to find out that it’s not actually centered around classical poetry as I understand it.

  6. Joseph S. Salemi

    There is also no freedom of speech in Sweden for anyone with politically incorrect viewpoints. You will lose your job if you so much as breathe a conservative idea. In addition, liberal Sweden encourages immigration from Third-Word cesspools, so that now large parts of the country are non-Swedish. Left-liberal Swedes have absolutely no love at all for their own culture, and are happy to see it die and be replaced.

    Give me the old warlike Sweden of Gustavus Adolphus. At least the nation wasn’t composed of wimps and degenerates.

    Reply
    • Rebecca P Jessup

      You will lose your job if you so much as breathe a conservative idea.

      Joseph Salemi, do you have any source for this? Do you know anyone, have you read of anyone who has lost their job? Generally the socialist system protects employees from any unfair treatment. Maybe they err in the direction of trying protect everybody from too many things, but no one could legally be fired for having conservative ideas, or for voicing them.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Oh really? I happen to know of four persons who lost their teaching jobs in Sweden for daring to express (in conversations with their colleagues at work) viewpoints that were not considered “progressive” enough. A friend in Uppsala has told me their stories.

        It’s one thing to have a pro forma law on the books protecting the rights of employees; it’s quite another to enforce it vigorously. These four persons were eased out of their jobs in a slick manner that avoided all legal pitfalls (Swedish bureaucrats are expert at that sort of maneuver), and which therefore left the teachers no recourse for complaint or grievance. And you think this place is a utopia? Or do you think that denying persons the right to make a living is somehow different from the persecution of political dissidents in North Korea or Red China?

        Also, ask your nephew about the mass rapes of Swedish women by immigrant vermin, and how these crimes are generally ignored by the Swedish police — and also by Swedish feminists, who seem to think that rapes committed by immigrants are somehow understandable.

  7. Evan Mantyk

    Dear Ms. Jessup,
    I was not talking about churches, I was talking about the supposedly “free” exchange of ideas in secular society. I was talking about students in schools. I was talking about the influential meetings and powerplays behind the scenes that determine the major outcomes in societies.
    I agree with Dr. Salemi and think it is probably even worse. In Sweden, as in many areas in the United States, you probably would not have a job in the first place if you “breathe a conservative view.”
    The facts speak for themselves. The Society of Classical Poets has been unfairly treated for breathing conservative views. There are stories too from people I personally know: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/crushed_by_the_leftist_juggernaut_one_lawyers_story.html
    And another:
    https://medium.com/@contact_38385/resignation-974d82c5d6bd?fbclid=IwAR1z0ygog5MBZ3XMK1R2OV9nf3L7XOXcmw05vtL7BKScoDeruNo7xZtUgbY
    These examples are in America and Canada. In Sweden, my impression is that the situation is even worse, where the same people being beat down here wouldn’t have even tried to breathe a conservative view there.
    From an economic perspective, below is an interesting piece, which seems to suggest that economic prosperity in Sweden is due to the reduction of more extreme socialist policies from the 1970s and that the current economic model Sweden is using is not at all socialist, including using school vouchers, privatizing health care and social programs, and taxing not just the rich heavily, but also the poor (there is the extra depressing element for you!) https://reason.com/video/stossel-sweden-not-a-socialist-success/

    Reply
  8. Joseph S. Salemi

    By the way, if one checks the website for the “Diskriminerings ombudsmannen” (the government official agency that enforces the anti-discrimination law in Sweden), one will read the following concerning the accepted grounds on which complaints of discrimination can be made:

    “Political convictions and ethical or philosophical values that are not related to religion are not covered by the Discrimination Act.”

    In other words, in Sweden you can be fired for your incorrect political opinions, and you have no legal recourse.

    Reply
  9. Rod Walford

    I found this thread very illuminating ! As a “newbie” to this website I am thrilled to see that “feistiness” still exists within the ranks of the scribes.
    Here is a poem I wrote a while back which you have all justified – thank you!
    I hope is is acceptable to post it here – I’m sure I shall be advised if not 🙂

    A POET’S HEART.

    A poet’s heart’s an endless thing,
    Ubiquitous, encompassing.
    It knows no bound nor borderline,
    Or darkness where it may not shine.

    A poet’s heart’s a joyful thing,
    It likes to laugh, and loves to sing.
    It lifts the spirit, holds it high,
    Then dances like a firefly.

    A poet’s heart’s a fragile thing,
    As brittle as a monarch’s wing.
    That flutters on a breath of air,
    The secrets of its soul to bare.

    A poet’s heart’s a vicious thing,
    Its bite is like a hornet’s sting.
    For it will strike just as and when
    It feels the censure of its pen.

    A poet’s heart’s a caring thing,
    Both empathy and hope to bring.
    A sunbeam’s touch it can impart
    To mollify the saddened heart.

    A poet’s heart’s a timeless thing,
    Whose ancient bell sustains its ring.
    That through the years, it may adorn
    Those generations yet unborn.

    Reply

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