Ha ha! Luckily I had more noble material to work from than when I wrote this:
Impeachment Poem
(A Parody of Maya Angelou’s Inaugural Poem)
20 November 1998
A Fraud, A Deceit, A Lie
Specious boasts each day imparted,
Charms of a charlatan.
The adulterer, who left genetic tokens
Of his tryst here
In our Oval Office.
Any broad, charmed by that lusty groom,
Is accosted in the press with spin and sophistry.
But today, History cries out to us, clearly, powerfully,
Scum, you may stand upon my
Neck and disgrace our founding tenets,
But seek no haven in your legacy.
I will bestow on you no accolades down there.
You, who think yourself no lower than
Ancient kings, have continued too long in
This ruse of maturity,
Have laid too many
And slandered their names.
Your lips’ lying words
Harming our daughters.
The Law cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your disgrace.
Down the mall on the Hill,
A Star sings a truthful song,
Come testify here by his side.
Each of you mercenary cohorts,
Hypocrites and dangerously proud,
Filibustering recklessly in the press.
Your smarmy struggles for this felon
Have left a squalid taste upon
My courts, a sullied blemish on the Presidency.
Yet, today I call you to testify,
If you will cover up no more. Come,
Clad in grease and you will sing the song
The Perpetrator gave to you when you and he
Agreed to profane the truth.
Before corruption was a scummy smear within our
House, and on the news your crew still
Denied it.
The Star sings and sings on.
There is a true burning to prosecute,
This ringing Infamy and lying Crock.
So say the Decent, the Lovers of Liberty,
The Upstanding, the Patriots, the Free
The Honest, the Moral, the Wise, the Just,
The Lawful, the Faithful, the Honest
The Good, the Dutiful, the Righteous
The Pious, the Kind-hearted, the Religious.
They hear. They all hear
The breaking of the Law.
Yesterday, the first witness of Liberty
Spoke to the committee. Hear him, here beside the Law.
Plant your hearts beside them, the Minutemen who died.
Each of you, citizens freed by some heroic
Soldier, has been paid for.
You, who were my first patriots, you
Bostonian, Virginian, Philadelphian, you
At Valley Forge, who frosted in winter, then
Marched on bloody feet, sustained me to the disappointment of
Socialist tyranny—desperate to enslave,
Starving for gold.
You, the Worker, the Soldier, the Statesman, the Poet...
You the Abolitionist, the Voter, the Parent, fought
Bold, unbroken, defying the tyrant
Defending your freedom.
Here, take your strength from me.
I am Liberty’s Tree watered by blood
Which will not be felled.
I Justice, I Freedom, I the Law
I am yours—but Vigilance must ever be paid.
Bring us justice, discipline this calumny
This night of sordid darkening morals.
Clinton, despite his filthy stain,
Cannot be erased, and if faced down
With courage, need not be suffered again.
Bring down these lies,
The nation is breaking in two.
Find worth again
In your freedom.
Women, children, men,
Cast this faker from the fruited lands.
Scold him for the rape of our most
Sacred creed. Inculpate him for
The damage of our most public trust.
Bring down his evil art,
Each new speech sells more mendacity
And new media spinning.
Do not be dissuaded ever
By polls, choked incessantly
By fecklessness.
The poison leaches inward,
Ordaining you by fate to face new depths of baseness.
Here, in this Republic’s foulest day
You must find the courage
To look to no easy out but me, the
Constitution, Justice, Rule of Law.
No less to citizens than the Executive.
No less to you now than the Founders then.
Here in the falsity of this modern day
You must have the guts to look down
And into this swindler’s eyes, into
His utter perfidy, his perjury
And say explicitly
Very explicitly
With reproach
Good riddance.
Shelley wrote the poem in (mostly) friendly competition with Horace Smith, on a subject set by the London
Examiner.
Just to round things out, here's the poem by Horace Smith:
"On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below"
IN Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
-- that sestet sort of gives one pause, doesn't it?
