Letters & Chants
Response from Readers
“Letters & Chants” is an on-going feature in Chant de la Sirène, which offers our journal audiences the opportunity to respond in writing or the other arts to our recently published issues. Send your “chants” about a specific past issue at the email below, in a Word doc attachment:
chantdelasirenesubmissions@gmail.com
More…“On Tyranny” (Issue 5)
Editor’s Note: We are currently welcoming responses to our most recent issue, “On Tyranny—Poetics & Protest Art.”
To the Editor:
I loved this issue on tyranny but want to say that tyranny is not overthrown by poetry although its absurdities can be exposed by satire and innuendo. Our writing can give people hope, courage and language to use in defense of freedom, but the work against tyranny happens in the courts that block autocratic actions, on the streets where citizens resist and object in public to the excesses of ICE, and in the legislatures where representatives of the people vote for the rights of their constituents. So poets and readers, write and publish more against tyranny, but please donate to the agencies like ACLU fighting in the courts, donate to your representatives in Congress and at the state level, and show up to stand in the street in defense of your rights.
James Sherry, Segue Foundation, New York City
Jan. 6, 2025
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A Ghazal for Renee & Her Son
And here is my ghazal for Renee
Waiting for Mama, RIP Renee Nicole Good
He's crying for his Mama
and his stuffies, filled with blood.
Mama sings him songs at night
his stuffies filled with blood.
He'll wait for Mama's special poem
his stuffies filled with blood.
His other Mama can’t find words
for the stuffies filled with blood,
she tries the songs he always loved
but no stuffies, filled with blood.
He cries, no one to comfort him
his stuffies filled with blood.
He looks outside, forever night
with no stuffies, filled with blood.
Sleep can't come till Mama's home
with his stuffies, drenched in blood.
Note: “Stuffies” are what Renee Good’s son called his stuffed animals, in the glove compartment of the car where she was shot dead by an ICE agent last week.
—Pamela Laskin, New York, New York
January 13, 2026
*
Response
"Treacherous" may be a world.
Hard to trust in spelling. Colonialist
legacy and acting out. Revisions
necessary to get it right
and yet still readable. Is this
just an exercise? proves nothing.
Image floating up from memory one
had rather preferred to have forgotten.
I don't remember how
I used to remember. Maybe
it simply came more easily.
I don't know, what
am I practicing, in order to
do what, to make what
possible? The walls are invisible,
intangible, and they are closing in.
You called me "Baby,"
didn't you? Mangling the syntax and
the grammar just by looking.
What are you trying to say?
This once fertile soil's now parched
of nutrients. Poached of incidents, futile.
The Presidential movies or motives
understand this need and lay themselves down.
—Steve Benson, Blue Hill, ME
Jan. 8, 2026
*
“Say her Name”
Say her name.
Her name was Good.
He shot her in the head
three times.
A poet was Good.
Never more
a make-it-new
poem from Good.
A mother was Good.
Never more
children’s summers
with Good.
ICE shot Good’s
summers
in the head
three times.
—Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Santa Barbara, CA
January 7, 2026
*
To the Editor:
One of the few times I’ve had the pleasure of breathing the same air as Susan M. Schultz was when she was visiting our town briefly on an academic mission during my husband’s months of chemo and she joined us one day for the however many hours he was tethered to the bag of chemicals dripping into whatever vein they were able to put a needle in (he has large veins that look promising but they roll and evade capture). We all laughed so hard for so long that I thought someone would kick us out but they didn’t. Neither Susan nor I took out a camera, more’s the pity. What can be more abstract and strange then poison dripping in to cure, cords and wires everywhere, nurses stepping over them to read our most intimate information. Go close with your macro lens, closer still, see what is left when context is stripped and only shape and color remain.
Now we are all tethered to who knows what with no steady nurse to make sure we are okay. Instead we have a wild man who fractures everything, who likes nothing better than chaos, who wants to see the machines flash FAIL and FAIL and FAIL again. In such a world things move so fast that interpretation is nearly impossible, emotions can paralyze us when we need to be nimble. If we are lucky we can try to stay steady, look for a way to do something. If we are unlucky our best hope is to roll, evade capture, find a safe enough place to surface, stay steady, and look for a way to do something. I take comfort in knowing we are far from the first society to live like this. Somehow people made it through. Wherever our eyes settle there is color and shape. Seeing this can be enough to see us through.
—Judy Roitman
Jan. 7, 2026
*
“Fin d’Année”
Daily life also made it difficult to see the situation clearly. Life went on as before . . . I still phoned my girlfriend Charlie. We went to the cinema, had a meal in a small wine bar, drank Chianti, and went dancing together. I still saw my friends, had discussions with acquaintances. Family birthdays were celebrated as they had always been . . . .
Strangely enough, it was just this automatic continuation of ordinary life that hindered any lively, forceful reaction against the horrors.”
— Sebastian Haffner, describing life in middle-class Berlin in March 1933
Our street feels quiet, though noise from Clinton Parkway got louder the last year or two—unmufflered cars and coal-rollin’ bros. At the end of the street sits an empty stone building that once served as a stop on the Underground Railroad (“John Brown slept here”). The rich Oklahoman college students reside in the refurbished house across the street where the Nazi used to live. The people on the corner never engage, don’t even leave their car to pick up the mail. B., at the other corner down the street, owned the company that did our bathrooms. Then there’s the family guy who comes home in a slicker with reflective tape. And the solitary dude who goes for a walk at the same time every day, no matter the season; has had a dead tree in his front yard for years.
M.R. left little boxes of peppermint bark at everyone’s door for Christmas (and yes, people around here are saying “Merry Christmas”); she knows everything that’s going on—I call her the “Mayor of Sagebrush Drive.” And she’s an election worker when we have elections. The next-door neighbors, alas, are Cubs fans—except maybe the harried mother. We go to work, do our jobs, come home, talk and avoid unpleasant topics. The houses are identical split-levels built during the first Nixon Administration. During COVID, this was my village.
Not as many fireworks New Year’s Eve as usual. We held our annual New Year’s Day open house for the neighbors, but only 11 people came this year. No precip in months, unlike California. I just prepared my yearly performance review file—a.k.a. the “suck-up letter.” Also tallied our expenses, which weren’t pretty (though we did give a few dollars to worthy causes). Everyone’s upset about the skyrocketing property tax assessments.
I finished re-reading The Descent of Allette. I doomscroll; but my 98-year-old lifelong-news-junkie dad won’t look at it anymore, ever since Russia invaded Ukraine: “I’ve seen this movie before.” It is important to spend time “in nature,” they say. The older I get, the more time I have to spend maintaining my body in a functional condition. It’s my job to do the shopping, keep the birdbath clean, and prepare young adults for a future they do not believe exists.
We spent last Saturday making mole sauce with our friend. Last week, I made chocolate chess pie. I also filled up my actual spare tire. I read the year-end plea from the activist groups (“only 24 hours left!”). I groomed. I strategized. I did what I was supposed to do.
—Joe Harrington, University of Kansas
Dec. 31, 2025
***
“Climate & Poetics” (Issue 4)
Editor’s Note—We received only two “chants” about the “Climate & Poetics” issue published in Fall 2024. One is a Letter to the Editor from Linda Russo, which reflects upon the capitalist economics behind our current destructive climate-change global events, and those infrastructures that refuse to address these events. In the wake of the recent COP meeting in Brazil, in which high ambitions for fossil fuel planetary phase-outs agreements were not realized, Russo’s letter seems appropriately “right on”—although she sent it last year.
We also received a moving poetry video by multi-media artist Alexis Kraskilvsky, whose visual-verbal topic is the aftermath of one of the world’s most destructive cyclones, the Bhola Cyclone in Bangladesh in 1970. The story behind Kraskilvsy’s lyrics recalling this catastrophic cyclone reminds us that increasingly dangerous global weather is to come, unless we can roll-back the warming numbers. Climate change, as Kraskilvsky reminds us, has been and will be particularly devastating to both indigenous and impoverished countries like Bangladesh. We publish Kraskilvsky’s video thinking ahead to the next CDLS— Issue 6—which will return to the topic of climate with a special focus on “Oceans & Rivers.” More information on Issue 6 with a call for work will be available here winter 2026.
With appreciation to Jonathan Skinner for help with establishing our new journal feature, “Letters & Chants.”
To the Editor:
I found the readings and the issue (and visuals) on “Climate & Poetics” [Issue 4 of Chant de la Sirène all very thought provoking. When we agree to say "climate and poetics" we are giving ourselves a choice. The planet is warming. The destructive colonial capitalist machinery chugs on. If one is not throwing their disobedient body in its path or raising their voice in solidarity against the further entrenchment of its infrastructures, or creating and implementing plans for sharing abundance and protecting the sovereignty and wellbeing of others, one is not moving themselves or anyone toward a different future. One might understand the choice to be between grieving and dreaming. But having no real options, being in a situation that requires both griefs and dreams, one must interrogate the comfort they find in a familiar spatiotemporality that maintains that the past brings us to grief while toward the future we aim our dreaming. When we agree to say "climate and poetics" we are speaking of other possible futures. Not just one; not just one's. We have agreed to acknowledge the potentiality of all other futurities. One in a position of privilege may signal acknowledgement with a display of uncertainty as rich and troubling as any unanticipated, unwelcome performance. This is anticipated in the agreement to respond to "climate and poetics." Whether poems will or will not make a difference they may make differentness visible. They may pay attention, tend to something, see it through beyond the slender difference.
—Linda Russo
***
—Alexis Krasilovsky, director, Cyclone Song (color video, 3:34 minutes)