Happy National Poetry Day! On this day when a US federal judge has suspended enforcement of the new anti-abortion law in Texas, the theme of NPD, serendipitously, is CHOICE.

Here’s a poem I wrote in the week after that law was passed, as part of an extended sequence in conversation with lines from the American proto-Beat poet, Kenneth Patchen. (That’s another story in itself.) The poem is angry, but let us take hope.

From Lines by Kenneth Patchen #17

Rock-a-bye poor ladies, the world was ever cruel and wrong.
This time it goes down singing a cruel cowboy song:
there’s a pretty little lady in the State of the Lone Star, 
in a state of do and re-do, and she’ll have to travel far,

and her heart is cold as clay, in a cloud of white linen.
And her heart is hard as clay, for the state says she’s sinnin’
but ‘sin’ is a form of moral threat and has no place in law.
Her heart is cracked as clay. And she can’t travel. She’s poor.

Your problem is one of sex, says Man in Stetson Hat, who has none. 
She thinks, that’s funny enough to break my heart, if I still had one,
but the blood’s been drained away from it and she knows she’s alone.
She sings, Boxers always hit harder when there are women around.

There’s a bounty-hunter keeping watch to sue whoever helps her —
she must speak in code for ’transport’, ‘money’, ‘blood’, and ‘shelter’.
You can sit down and listen, but she’ll keep her story short,
because anyone who sympathises with her could end up in court

— and the thing about a civil suit is, it keeps the state clean.
It’s divide-and-conquer, it’s dirty tricks, it’s the sub-routine,
It’s informers, it’s Stasi, it’s the shame of the county,
and no man’s life can be beautiful if even one man gets this bounty.

O Lady, poor lady, please sit pretty tight
while help’s smuggled in by stealth of night —
too late for you, maybe, but maybe not to late for your sister
tell her, just sit tight till the soul plasma gets here.

You’re just a young lady in the backstreets of Laredo, 
O young lady in Laredo, with your life still ahead —
But this re-do is a no-do, and your coat-hanger’s waiting —
and this law will still be working if you wind up dead.