Thursday, February 27, 2014

Birds With Two Right Wings by Lawrence Ferlinghetti





This is an image of how someone feels about their government in their country. Just as Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt in a poem he wrote called Birds With Two Right Wings.


Bird With Two Right Wings by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

And now our government
a bird with two right wings
flies on from zone to zone
while we go on having our little fun & games
at each election
as if it really mattered who the pilot is
of Air Force One
(They're interchangeable, stupid!)
While this bird with two right wings
flies right on with its corporate flight crew
And this year its the Great Movie Cowboy in the cockpit
And next year its the great Bush pilot
And now its the Chameleon Kid
and he keeps changing the logo on his captains cap
and now its a donkey and now an elephant
and now some kind of donkephant
And now we recognize two of the crew
who took out a contract on America
and one is a certain gringo wretch
who's busy monkeywrenching
crucial parts of the engine
and its life-support systems
and they got a big fat hose
to siphon off the fuel to privatized tanks
And all the while we just sit there
in the passenger seats
without parachutes
listening to all the news that's fit to air
over the one-way PA system
about how the contract on America
is really good for us etcetera
As all the while the plane lumbers on
into its postmodern
manifest destiny 

Birds With Two Right Wings

Throughout this poem it is evident that Ferlinghetti isn’t satisfied with the American government at the time, this idea is reoccurring within his numerous political poems. The main theme that is illustrated in the text above, is that the democratic and republican parties are both right wings, therefore it does not matter who is in charge, the country will operate the same order either way.  In shorter terms, The United States future only has one direction and Lawrence Ferlinghetti believes that direction is south.

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