Summer Headlines (Poem)

Summer Headlines

In a season that gives women's names
to summer storms

Cindy Sheehan goes to court,
her crime the crossing of a line

dividing mothers from their sons.
Ten Russians, their sleepers' cover blown,

get swapped for four whose years
behind the bars their faces wear

like stripes re-lashed on prison clothes.
The French regard for scandal

brings tv to Sarkozy, but cake he offers
not where thick-tongued bon mots do.

LeBron free agent takes Miami Heat
and Cleveland decries it foul.

The bulls run their mean streak through Pamplona
while oil chews its path through marsh

to shore, relentless, like the stream
of Srebrenica's green-covered coffins

borne 60,000 strong to Potocari,
Mladic the general a fugitive still.

Cloud computing's future's hazy,
Polanski's the Swiss assured. Spain beats

Netherlands in South Africa and scores
fall in Nairobi, twin blasts rocking

out in World Cup mischief. Elsewhere,
one hundred eleven naked people

wearing nothing but some sun screen
skinny dip their way into a record book

and a woman in Maine gets a class ring
back after twenty-eight years. Meanwhile,

six months since January and counting,
Haiti's homeless live and eat and sleep in streets,

like the oily pelican chicks on island rookeries,
waiting for the clean-up.

© 2010 Maureen E. Doallas. All Rights Reserved.
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I wrote this poem for the Tuesday, July 13, Blog Carnival sponsored by Bridget Chumbley at One Word at a Time and Peter Pollock of Rediscovering the Church.

The Blog Carnival is a biweekly online event open to anyone. Participants write on a one-word prompt or topic. This week's one word is "summer".

At Bridget's place you'll find a list of links to all of the contributions, which are posted throughout Tuesday and often through to the end of the week.

The Blog Carnival's FaceBook page is here.

The prompt for the next Blog Carnival, on July 27, is "ego".