POET DOUG ANDERSON

I’m a great supporter of poets and poetry. This was written by my friend Doug Anderson a fellow poet who is a supremely good writer. He gave me his permission to publish it. Because it’s short I thought it was a coffee-sipping kind of read, and something one might not ordinarily come across.

The Rich

And it came to pass

there was no place left

to pile the garbage, no place

to live, so the rich pushed all the others

into the outer darkness to die.

They had no one to sell to,

to squeeze for money, so they sat

before their pyres of burning tires

and fondled their rings, their gold teeth,

and gambled away the buttons on their shirts.

—

copyright 2015 Doug Anderson

Doug Anderson’s first full-length book of poems, The Moon Reflected Fire, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and his second book, Blues for Unemployed Secret Police, a grant from the Academy of American Poets. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and other funding organizations. He has taught at Smith and Emerson Colleges, and in the MFA programs at Bennington College and Pacific University of Oregon. He was for many years a teaching affiliate of the Joiner Center for the Study of War and It’s Social Consequences at UMASS Boston. His memoir, Keep Your Head Down, was published by W.W. Norton in 2009. His new book of poems is Horse Medicine published by Barrow Street Books. Poems from this collection can be found in Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Field, Cimarron Review, and other publications. He teaches in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.