Women's Voices For Change

Today’s poem for Veterans Day does more than just pay homage to soldiers fallen in battle; it also carries an implicit critique of the wars that give rise to such battles.

“All Hallows Eve, Edgewater Inn” is both an occasional poem about Halloween and a pastoral poem, one where a speaker’s contemplation of a natural landscape triggers inner reflection.

What is happening to Salvadoran refugees in this country today are the threads that weave the rich, tragic tapestry of today’s poem.

One strength of today’s poem, though, is that it works even for readers not familiar with that infamous case involving a Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious young woman behind a dumpster. Even before #metoo, sexual assaults like this are common enough, unfortunately, that readers will get the gist.

This brief lyric poem captures a moment familiar to most parents experiencing dismay at the state of the world and the need to grapple with that in the context of having children they want to protect.

Poems like this one that demand more of the reader’s attention and effort risk being passed over by readers unwilling to make the investment. But they reward readers who do.

The poem’s title is, in a way, its redemption. The poet explains that the dreaded nuclear attack did not come during the speaker’s childhood (or yet), and thanks the man she credits with saving the United States from that fate during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

I wrote this poem thinking about the hypocrisy of faith—how so often religious tenets are born out of or centered around survivalism but are then spun around to kill and hate—and the need to question our beliefs (religious or not) and where they come from.