“Hello, I Am Not a Soldier” by Abby E. Murray

Rattle Magazine has an ongoing series called Poets Respond which publishes at least one poem a week based on something that happened in the news in the last week.

Today, Rattle published a powerful poem from Abby E. Murray. I happen to know Abby because they did their doctoral work at Binghamton University where they served as director of the Binghamton Poetry Project when I first became involved with it.

The poem “Hello, I Am Not a Soldier” comes from Abby’s reaction to the incoming Trump administration’s nomination for various positions, especially defense secretary. You can read the poem at the link above, as well as hear Abby read it.

The lines that are resonating particularly with me this morning are

… I ration false comfort by knowing

it has never not been this way

What about this poem resonates with you?

(Photo by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash. Due to Instagram requirements, I needed an image to go with this post and opted for my standard Vote for Democary ’24 image. Tags are also broken at WordPress right now; I hope to add some later when that function is fixed.)