Pip: Welcome to osoparavos.com — where the political moment gets the poetic treatment it probably deserves and definitely didn’t ask for.
Mara: Today we’re looking at work by Adam Donaldson Powell — satire, verse, and sharp observation trained on the Trump years and everything churning underneath them.
Pip: Let’s start with the poetry of power — and what happens when a king won’t leave the room.
The Elephant in the Room: Trump in Verse and Rondeau
Mara: The anchor here is a French-language rondeau called “Le Secret de Polichinelle” — Polichinelle’s secret being, in French idiom, the thing everyone already knows but no one will say aloud.
Pip: The poem sets the scene in a sweat-slicked throne room, and the figure at the center is not subtle. The opening stanza places us right there: “Trône un roi gras — ricanant, / Batte la table — il se croit / Soleil du monde — et des lois.”
Mara: A fat king, sneering, banging the table, convinced he is the sun of the world and of its laws. That image does a lot of work — the rondeau form, circular and repetitive by design, mirrors the exhausting loop of watching someone perform their own greatness.
Pip: The rondeau keeps returning to its refrain about the elephant haunting the room. Which, given the Republican symbol, is either a coincidence or the least subtle pun in contemporary francophone verse.
Mara: The poem moves through nine sections, and it doesn’t stay in the throne room. It follows the courtiers into the corridors, the chapels, the late-night drinking — people bowing publicly, then murmuring in private: “Qu’il meure vite — et maintenant.” Which translates roughly as: may it end, and soon.
Pip: That’s the real subject — not just the king, but the psychology of the crowd around him. The ones who applaud the maudits mots, the most cursed words, because the alternative feels worse.
Mara: “The trump years” covers the same territory in English and in a very different register — a ledger swinging like a carnival ride, Main Street shuttered, families fractured at borders. One image lands hard: “cardboard blossoms where no seed grows, / a man folds winter into his coat, / counts loose change like a lifeboat.”
Pip: Both pieces are doing the same thing from different angles — one through the grotesque pageantry of the court, one through the street-level cost. The rondeau looks up at the throne; the poem looks down at the pavement.
Mara: “The trump years” closes on a nation “riding its own divide, / unable yet to step aside.” No resolution — just the ongoing vertigo.
Pip: Which is, honestly, a more honest ending than most.
Mara: The post also includes two additional poems — “Nighthawk” and “Saturn’s Blues” — both circling a similar atmosphere of dread and endurance, the sense of a long and severe influence settling in.
Pip: Satire as survival strategy. The ideas underneath that carry forward into everything else here.
Mara: What holds these pieces together is the question of how people live inside a moment they can’t control — whether they’re in a French rondeau court or counting change on Main Street.
Pip: Same vertigo, different languages. More of that next time.
Leave a Reply