George Longenecker
It was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
—Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities,” 1859
By George Longenecker
The last year has been a time of despair, yet also a time of creativity. Writers from Vermont and beyond contributed to “The Country in the Mirror: Poems of Protest and Witness” (Rootstock Publishing, April 2026). Editor Sharon Darrow was inspired by the iconic anthology “Against Forgetting,” edited by Carolyn Forche in 1993. This anthology focuses on the contemporary United States with more than 200 excellent, heart-wrenching poems.
Chard De Niord, former Vermont Poet Laureate, writes of those who despise art and poetry in “Prophecy Against Those”: “They will grow ass’s ears and stand / and stand like guards at the funerals of their own mothers. / They will forget history as if it were / a bad memory they can live without. / They will become victims of their own crimes. / They will confuse art with propaganda and advertisements… / They will recoil with disdain at poetry.”
Former Vermont Governor Madeleine May Kunin speaks to writing in “The Perfect Space:” “Writing poetry is a good hiding place / From the horror, the mayhem, / And the cruelty — / We foist on one another.”
Judith Janoo finds hope in “The Still Small Possibility.” She begins the poem with an epigraph from the late Vermont Poet Laureate Grace Paley: “Hope is action.” Janoo goes on to say: “Any day now / news will bend / like cosmos stems / toward the sun.”
Erika Nichols-Frazer’s poem “Believe Them” is a warning cry.
They said they would come for us and they came.
Not with pitchforks but with flags.
They shouted peace while attacking a sanctuary,
freedom while controlling our bodies.
What they said they would do they did with fervor,
with violence, with a smile. We saw this coming.
Everything will be fine, they said but what they meant was,
I will be fine.
I am safe.
David Katz and Martín Espada both speak to the foibles of a despot. Katz writes in “The Green of Greenland:” “He dreamed his face was on a silver coin, / The chief and chairman / of eight billion souls. / By day he spawned an atmosphere of air / Hot as the planet that he sought to gain / Starting with the surrender of Ukraine / And the deep-mined plunder of Greenland.” Espada’s “The Snake” takes readers to a different use of poetry: “At the Save America rallies, after the damnation of the criminal aliens breaking / across our borders and 1,900 percent more murders, he would ask the crowds / if he could read a poem. This has to do with immigration, he’d say. / The crowd would whoop and yip. / He would read The Snake, words stolen from a song, / from the hand of a dead Black singer who could not snatch it back,”
“The Country in the Mirror” takes readers beyond despair with excellent poems that bear witness. These are not only poems of dissent; they are works of art and a history of these times.
“Poems of Protest and Witness,” edited by Sharon Darrow. Rootstock Publishing, Montpelier.
