Patience Worth and Poet's Manifest

I The prose & prosaic lives pursuing career From apartheid in Africa to US freedoms (1983) Poets voices muted, too much hunger The luxury of democracy, enduring systems Of dispossession, of marginalising, silencing With vigilante foes of one's own kind - for fame? - Yet systems of food distribution, & of medicines Need democracy, too, urgent reform Pandemics reinforce the civilized caste sytem II Is there a military-pharma-cyber mafia? What will my pen say - or my spirit say - When the prosaic careers go silent The itch to write nudges me to poetry For the likes of Patience Worth (d.1641) Quaker girl worked fingers to the bone Yet desired art of writing, exploring ... Now The unraveling of time: Pearl Curran became her pen 400 years later! There is a colonial captive A hidden teacher-philosopher from Old Afrik, here Telling of a tax-technology-robotic civilization Of new high priests, go-betweens in art, science, family