RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
Remembering Ronnie
I remember Ronald Reagan
The man Republicans used to love
Now that we’ve experienced Dubya
and the Don we know he’s not
as bad as we once thought
He was bad but not that bad
He never started a war on one nation (Iraq)
for the crimes of another (Afghanistan)
He never drove the economy over a cliff
He never called for open insurrection
He only sold arms to an enemy (Iran)
He only punished poor people
He only turned his back on gays (AIDS)
Some of it was not his fault
He was largely absent in his second term
His dementia was clear enough
His Alzheimer’s was diagnosed later
Reagan was elected to his second term
at the age of seventy-three
Americans may soon face a choice of
two elderly men to lead the country
One would be 77 at his inauguration
The other would be eighty-one
Give all that America and the world faces
Global climate change
Russian military aggression
A Chinese-Russian alliance
Challenges to democracy
A world in constant crisis
Do we really want to trust the next
four years and the future of the planet
to a man who may not remember
who Ronald Reagan was?
