America in 1952

by Lorri Ventura


Mr.  Potato Head is a real potato
Festooned with purchased plastic facial features.
Ralph Kramden drives a Brooklyn bus
In search of happiness.

The birth rate is double what it was ten years earlier.
Relishing post-war prosperity,
Americans are mass consumers of all things material.
Owning a suburban home
Has become more affordable
Than renting a city tenement.
A nation economically unrivaled!

Life is simpler
Happier
Sweeter now 
Than ever before
Our descendants will reflect back longingly
On “the good old days”
And call us blessed

But women in 1952
Cannot sell or buy property
Control their own earnings,
Or draft their own wills

Children of color
Cannot attend a well-resourced
Integrated public school
And fewer than two of every ten black children
Have the opportunity to graduate from high school

Youngsters with disabilities 
Languish at home
Public school doors closed to them
Or live, warehoused, in institutions
Isolated from their families

Paupers
Petty criminals
Persons with mental illness
Subsist, quartered in dungeon-like facilities
Sterilized, lobotomized
To make life easier for the rest of us

People suspected of engaging in homosexual behavior
Are denied jobs and housing
And the United States Post Office
Reads our mail, destroying 
Any missives that hint of gay content

Rosy retrospection
Focusing on a decade
Of unprecedented growth
At the expense of our most vulnerable citizens
Paints a false picture
Of “good old days” that never were.


* * * * *

Lorri Ventura is a retired special education administrator living in Massachusetts. She is new to poetry-writing. Her poems have been featured in several anthologies, in Red Eft Journal, Quabbin Quills, Mad Swirl, and AllPoetry. She is a three-time winner of Writing In A Woman's Voice's Moon Prize.