Are We Prepared?

By  Millie Renfrow

(Editor’s note: Although Millie wrote this poem in March of 2017,
It reads as if it could be written in March of 2025)

Fellow Citizens of the United States of America,

we meet at the axis of a revolution –

both political and social –

sweeping through our national life

such as we have never experienced

in most of our lives to date.

We enter a new war.

What poem will emerge

to fill this void?

There’s the key…

to alter the relationships

between this poet and others…

The man who has usurped the Presidency

speaks with forked tongue,

spewing anger, lacking understanding

of citizens, speaks like a dictator,

expects obedience without question.

Poems that leave us changed

must be named in performative

speech, language that both summons

and constitutes action. I swim,

breathing struggles with fear

filling these days.

Yet the poet speaks to you with tender silence

like a cloud above the lake or a tree

beside the stream. What is poetry

that does not save nations or people?

Feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.                       

Another of Millie’s sketches - The Tangle

Washingtonian Millie Renfrow was a Seattle area teacher, artist, and poet who was born in 1936, grew up in Ellensburg and passed away in Lynnwood on January 15, 2025.

She took classes at Seattle’s Hugo House and completed the UW Certificate Program in Poetry. When Covid-19 threw the world cattywampus, Millie was unable to transition with her Greenwood poetry critique group to meeting over Zoom. O

ver the years, she participated in Haiku Northwest, Poets on the Coast retreats for women, and visual art getaways. She won the Phyllis L. Enne’s poetry prize at the 2016 Skagit Poetry Festival.