When I was thinking about The Bop, a poem I wrote in 2018 for The Woody Guthrie Festival poetry reading came to mind. Here is the poem, which was published after the festival in The Oklahoma Observer and in my book, I’ve Got the Blues: Looking for Justice in a Red State:

Lines for My Friend, Sandy, Who Wanted a Lighthearted Poem

It’s hard to be lighthearted
when your president’s a liar,
when the whole dang world is threatened
by his pants that are afire.

He shreds the Constitution
and feeds it to the rats,
rules by whim and fiat
and blames the Democrats.

To think, he used to be one!
But then the party turned.
No longer segregationist!
The Jim Crow laws all burned,

at least in legal rule books.
We know Jim Crow’s still here,
and the liar’s words and actions
stir up the racists’ fears.

Adored by evangelicals.
I can’t imagine why.
This preacher’s kid knows Christians,
and this hater comes up shy.

He’s stacking courts with corporatists
undoing revolution.
We shed the aristocracy once.
This backward evolution

should not sit well with patriots,
and that’s us, do you hear,
the workers and the poets,
the brown folk and the queer,

moms and dads, day laborers,
all those who earn a wage,
who vote and pay their taxes,
the ignorant and the sage.

We’re all in this together
We all must march and shout
and call and vote and rally.
We can’t sit this one out.

Here’s hoping there is justice
and it lands his butt in jail.
Do you believe in karma?
Will Putin go his bail?

July 2018

I decided to twist the first line and make the revised first stanza my response for my Bop.
Now, I just need to write the poem. I have an idea and less than forty minutes. Wish me luck!