It has come to my attention that this year’s Nebula Awards include one for poetry. This is a new and welcome addition, given the amount of excellent poetry published over the years in science fiction and fantasy magazines, not to mention collections published by Aqueduct Press, among other publishers.
It happens that I had a poem this year in the anthology Alternative Liberties, a book conceived of on election day in 2024 and published on January 20, 2025. The publisher, B Cubed Press, has made a point of publishing anthologies that use speculative fiction and poetry, plus the occasional essay from SF/F writers, to address the political struggles of our time.
In addition to my poem, Alternative Liberties includes stories by such people as Louise Marley, Adam-Troy Castro, Brenda Cooper, and Elwin Cotman. It’s highly recommended reading for our time. By the way, the publisher has put out a call for a sequel, More Alternative Liberties. Submissions must be in by December 20.
I’m reprinting my poem from the anthology here to make it easy for any SFWA members who would like to consider it for the poetry Nebula and also to encourage people to get copies of the whole anthology. You could give copies of it to any friends or relatives who might have voted badly in 2024 and come to regret that, just as a suggestion.
As most people know, i write a senryu to capture my mood each morning. This poem consists of five senryu reworked from among those written in my daily practice.
Not Civilized Yet
The election proved
what I’ve been saying for years:
Not civilized yet.Grifters, broligarchs,
and extreme Christians in charge.
Not civilized yet.Cops and presidents
can get away with it all.
Not civilized yet.Control all women.
Who cares if old people die.
Not civilized yet.We’re fighting once more
for the rights we thought we’d won.
Not civilized yet.
When I originally put the poem together, I wanted something longer — three segments (as in a senryu), one five verses, one seven, and another one of five. The editor only wanted the first segment. In the interest of continuing the political discussion that this poem addresses, here is the three-part version. This is not for the Nebulas, but just an opportunity to share the way I was thinking about things a year ago as we tried to figure out how to respond to where the country was headed.
17 Senryu in Search of Some Truth
Part I: Not Civilized Yet
The election proved
what I’ve been saying for years:
Not civilized yet.Grifters, broligarchs,
and extreme Christians in charge.
Not civilized yet.Cops and presidents
can get away with it all.
Not civilized yet.Control all women.
Who cares if old people die.
Not civilized yet.We’re fighting once more
for the rights we thought we’d won.
Not civilized yet.Part II: So Many Seeking Money
Traitors should be jailed.
Instead, insurrection wins,
rule of law loses.Powerful people
bend the knee and kiss the … ring,
send the grifter money.Plans to go to Mars.
People with nowhere to live,
not even the streets.It’s “drill, baby, drill”
while the world burns and seas rise.
Profit trumps future.Insects don’t matter,
nor birds, fish, or even trees.
Profit trumps nature.Build private cities
with guards to stop the riff-raff.
Most folks are riff-raff.Politicians sit,
watch the slide to fascism,
ask us for money.Part III: Build Our Own Future
Things getting much worse.
Keep saying I can’t stand it,
but I’m still standing.Avoiding despair
while paying close attention:
A daily struggle.Don’t obey or scream.
Start building useful systems
to fill in the holes.The cynics forbid
imagining better worlds,
but what if we do?Open up your minds.
Make islands of coherence.
We’ll bring about change.
Because I need hope, I like the last three senryu in particular. And particularly, “Islands of coherence.”
I need hope, too. I intentionally wrote this with an eye to providing hope at the end. I think the level of anger last fall when folks were editing the anthology led to more interest in the first five verses.
Your comment made me realize that I really considered “islands of coherence” vitally important last fall. It occurs to me that I have found some in working with Unbreaking.org and in the rapid progress of renewable energy, but I know it means something larger to me, indicates what we need to be doing now.
I had forgotten where I first read those words and what the context was. Fortunately, I had written about the idea earlier (on this very blog a year ago on Dec. 20, 2024). It’s from the physicist, chemist, and complexity thinker Ilya Prigogine. Here’s what I wrote about that last year:
“Small islands of coherence. That’s our best path forward. We can’t fix the whole system in one fell swoop – much as I’d like to – but we might make a few things that can pick up the pieces in good ways.
“Islands of coherence comes from an observation by Ilya Prigogine:
“‘When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.’
“He was coming at this from chemistry and physics, but his view was much broader than the scientific. (When I started looking him up, having stumbled across the quotation, I found connections that led back to Donna Haraway. Amazing how many great ideas lead back to Haraway.)”