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 Americans. 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.