Second Coming No. 336 — December 21, 2025
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by Donald Trump and his fascist regime
Lanette Sweeney
A Blessing for the Ice Agents
May each child you rip
from the arms of her mother
take an ice pick to the block
around your heart.
May you hear the compounding screams
of all the children you’ve detained
every time you tuck your own child
into her warm, safe bed.
May each of the 50,000 signing-bonus dollars
cause 100 new hairs to sprout from your knuckles,
your back, your brow — so that every day you look
more like the monster that money made you.
May the shrieks of every mother
you throw to the ground ring in your ears
when your wife or mother embraces you.
May the faces of the men you broke
stare back from your mirror each morning
as you try to scrub off the stains of your complicity.
May you never sleep another peaceful night
so long as any body you’ve flung into a cage
curls fitfully in a cement corner, uses mylar
as a blanket, gets drinking water from a toilet.
May your own suffering and new agonies
visited upon everyone you love
force you to compassion the way
you forced prisoners to their knees.
May you prostrate yourself
before a god not known for mercy,
desperately sorry for the lives you destroyed,
newly awake, unable to continue.
After, may you be humbled to find yourself
amazed by the warm touch of dawn,
by how much better life can feel
when your labors are made of love.
Lanette Sweeney is the author of the poetry collection What I Should Have Said: A Poetry Memoir about Losing a Child to Addiction (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Please See Me, Amethyst Review, Whistling Shade, Shawangunk Review, HuffPost Personal, and other journals, as well as in the college textbook Women: Images and Reality (McGraw-Hill Education, 2011). Sweeney lives with her wife and their pets in South Hadley, MA.
Second Coming is a project of Indolent Books, a haven for poets over 50 without a first book and a welcoming space for women, people of color, queer and trans writers, and others who do not fit molds or conform to expectations.
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Intense. Perfect.
Made me weep! So powerful!