Basta!
A ghazal by Andrea Fry
Is there a common measure of enough?
And which increment morphs into “enough?”
A subjective voice must name the limit—
masochist signals when his pain’s enough,
The politician who keeps on smiling—
What’s his tipping point? When’s he heard enough?
I’m so confounded by all the excess,
yet the clamor says I don’t have enough.
Get more stocks, sex, friends, technology.
Worry that I’m not fit or thin enough!
Then lift my jowls into emoticons.
Despair that I’m no longer young enough.
The crooks in office sold their souls en masse.
The scale of their enrichment not enough.
Drill the oceans. Shaft the poor. Go for more!
Get more guns, never tragedy enough.
Do I need to list the suffering? Is
violence to children not vile enough?
And now a crude, corrupt and greedy thug,
marbled lobbies, bikinis—not enough—
tweets rage, misogyny, intolerance.
His world’s not white and masculine enough.
While I can’t find refuge from his squalor,
for him the spotlight can’t be big enough.
I swear now is that elusive frontier.
That universal measure of “enough.”
Perhaps it’s got nothing to do with man,
and what we think is or is not enough.
Global warming, germs, the San Andreas…
Instead, might the earth say to us?—Enough!
Andrea Fry was born in Dallas, raised mainly in New York City and the Catskill Mountains, and educated at Union College and Columbia University. She published her first collection of poems, The Bottle Diggers, in May 2017 (Turning Point Press). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her poem “Murder,” which was published by J Journal. She was a finalist in Georgia College’s Arts & Letters Prize 2010 contest, a semi-finalist in the 2010 Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and a semi-finalist in River Styx 2010 International Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Ars Medica (University of Toronto Press), Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, The Comstock Review, Graham House Review, Reed Magazine, Stanford Literary Review, St. Petersburg Review, and the chapbook Still Against War, Poems for Marie Ponsot. Andrea is also a nurse practitioner at NYU Langone Medical Center. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two formerly feral felines. Visit her website at www.andrealfry.com.
Photo credit: Thibaud Saintin via a Creative Commons license.