Vox Populi

A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 6,000,000 visitors since 2014 and over 9,000 archived posts.

Jane C. Miller: Two Poems

What’s ahead
horses see only
by degrees, the way love ends,
no one touching in the dark.

March 24, 2025 · 9 Comments

William D. Hartung: The New Age Militarists

According to this view, the rise of the West wasn’t due to “the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”

March 24, 2025 · 9 Comments

Lawrence Wray: Stonehouse Alms

There is in me a traipsing line of ragged men
I can’t ignore. Grass stalks dangle from chinks
in the house’s mortar by the caged window.

March 23, 2025 · 6 Comments

Abby Zimet: No One Cares We Grieve When We Bury Our Children

Of over 600 Palestinians killed this week in savage new US-funded Israeli bombings, officials say over 40% were children in the bloodiest few days of a bloody campaign Israeli leaders call “only the beginning.”

March 23, 2025 · 11 Comments

Nicanor Parra: There is a happy day / Hay un día feliz

I went wandering this afternoon
The lonely streets of my village
Accompanied by the good twilight
Which is the only friend I have left.

March 22, 2025 · 17 Comments

George Yancy: How Should We Rethink Our Relationship to US Violence Around the World?

Democracy-destroying forces thrive off militarism. We have to resist both. A conversation with Norman Solomon.

March 21, 2025 · 4 Comments

Naomi Shihab Nye: Voice of America

The Voice of America got us to Karachi. Damascus. Islamabad. Dhaka. We went everywhere thanks to the Voice of America. Sat in circles on wooden floors, wore white flower garlands on beaches. Spent birthdays beneath mosquito nets. Rode in rickshaws. Stirred curries. Made friends. Loners. Social butterflies. A monkey climbed through a window in south India to lift the lid of a pot.

March 20, 2025 · 12 Comments

Ann Fisher-Wirth: Empathy

In the long long bliss of the breastfeeding years, I belonged to that rocking chair where sun filtered through the window and the leaves of the summer pomegranate shifted slowly in the hot June air.

March 19, 2025 · 13 Comments

Rachel Hadas: Why Trump’s rage defies historical and literary comparisons

As he has gained fame and power, Trump’s contemptuous rage at his opponents and his appetite for vengeance appear to have sharpened. 

March 18, 2025 · 7 Comments

Kathleen O’Toole: Migrations

On exiting “Warmth of Other Suns” at the Phillips Collection, 2020

March 17, 2025 · 11 Comments

Sam Carliner: How pro-Palestine student activists are fighting increasing repression

As universities and the government crack down on the student movement for Palestine, activists are organizing broad campaigns to get their charges dropped.    

March 17, 2025 · 5 Comments

Naomi Shihab Nye: The Words Under the Words

My grandmother’s days are made of bread,
a round pat-pat and the slow baking.
She waits by the oven watching a strange car
circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,
lost to America.

March 16, 2025 · 24 Comments

Linda Blaskey: Two Poems

The air I take in feels thin, ragged, and rough against the walls of my lungs.
This neighbor to the south of us uses a .22 long rifle.
So does the neighbor to the north.

March 15, 2025 · 17 Comments

William Trowbridge: Gun Crazy, 1955

My father, despite the possibility of a court martial, plus a ban against shipping firearms from overseas, managed to get his service pistol and an assortment of souvenir German firearms shipped to our home in his Army foot locker

March 15, 2025 · 9 Comments

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