Thursday, April 13, 2017

Not a Joke




Not a Joke

Isn’t it funny
(not a joke
no humor
no puns)
Isn’t it funny
how war creates a necessity
that strips away all the labels
previously preventing a person’s
life work?

Isn’t it funny
(not a joke
no humor
no puns)
Isn’t it funny
how the devastation of war
creates industries
and builds an economy out of
destruction?


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2017




“My mother was writing her dissertation when I was little and got her Ph.D. in 1939. But it was the middle of the Depression; she was Jewish, a socialist, and a woman; and she couldn’t get a job teaching. But when the Second World War broke out, she got a job on an assembly line in a bomb factory, and Bud went to work as a carpenter in a shipyard.”

http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/malvina-reynolds/


4 comments:

  1. Sad, ironic truth. My mother taught as a widow, mid WWII, but had to stop when she re-married, the 'rule' for married women. I like the repetition.

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  2. ML thanks for sharing your story behind the poem.

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  3. Yes, true. Sad and ironic.

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  4. I'm saddened that we are beginning to see this play out right now, with our president playing at "strong-man" and claiming he'll save our economy.

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