Below I am posting a powerful poem by Jeanne Ross, a dear friend of mine for four decades and a therapist working to heal people's pyschological wounds.  Inspired by "Strange Fruit" the classic anti-lynching song  perforned by Billie Holliday written by Abel Meeropol, teacher, Communist and later the man who with his wife adopted Robert and  U.S. government , the poem cries out against the poisoned politics of yesterday and today

Jeanne is also the widow of Michael Nash, the late director of the Tamiment Library, whose remarkable work made Tamiment into the leading library and archive of U.S. labor and the U.S. left in the world.  Michael I am sure would have been deeply moved by this poem as I hope our readers are

Norman Markowitz

Poison

         By Jeanne H. Ross

Southern trees now unencumbered

by the strange fruit they once bore by the hundreds of thousands

now stretch their limbs upward

seeking sustenance from the sun

while rooted in ground soaked with the thich red nectar which dripped from the rotted fruit

mixed with the urine and feces given up in death throes

seeping through the earth.

Evil winds its way through crevasses and fractures northward and westward until the entire edifice is poisoned by the hatred it spreads.

Slavery and sharecropping in the south, indentured servants and wage slaves in the north, vanquished First Nations in the west, mail order brides, sex slaves and beasts of burdens for the male settlers we honor, the continued objectification and subjugation of an entire gender: all nourished by the effluvium.

My country I implore ----

Cleanse yourself,

Transcend this veil of delusion

Embrace the reality of the sorrow

And thus, with eyes open can we attain greatness for our people, for the world