Poet Scott Cairns has a message for the President

There are very few Substack updates that make me stop whatever I’m doing when they arrive. I quiet down, I follow the link, and I pay close attention. If my Gmail alerts me to the fact that Scott Cairns has posted some new poetry, I have nothing better to do than to read it.

Today, on Juneteenth, Cairns shares a particularly pointed poem for the President who seems hell-bent on erasing hard-won freedoms for Black and brown Americans, and relentlessly endangering and abusing Black and brown immigrants. (I have closed comments, as the daily evidence of such things is undeniable. Those who deny it enable and advance the racism that MAGA openly celebrates. One need only consider the aggressive gerrymandering in red states designed to render Black Americans’ votes almost meaningless, and that’s just one example. “You’re ‘free‘ to vote, but we’ll ensure your vote means less than a white person’s.”)

The poem may not address that particular branch of the President’s cruelty; these lines cast a wider net, as there are just so many new horrors being brazenly committed by and for this man.

Here is “My Message to the President,” which reads to me as a bold way of obeying Christ’s command that we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

As ever, Scott is a mentor, an inspiration, a guiding light for me. I am eagerly awaiting his new collection, Against Certainty, from Slant Books. That is the title he has given a poem he published at Substack earlier this month.