STACY BANNERMANs sharp and well carved imagery portrays paradoxical shadows that haunt the land of America and super giants in the world today. PROPHETIC. Her metaphors are sickle spikes that shred bellies of warlords and the emotion in her voice is painful and strikes deeper into the bone and marrow of her audience. BANNERMAN pens confessional and emotional deep poetry. She writes of poverty and menacing situations perpetuated by war and other atrocities. The poet ,peacemaker , life giver AND teacher yearns for the end of war .And at the same time chronicles tough war experiences , mind grilling traumas , heart raving suffering and brain draining vices as resultant tragedies of war , her verses are turgid with hard granite truth , her poetry is thick canopies succulent with sad realities and complexities perpetuated by the unrepentant monster of devilish dictatorial tendencies and satanic warlordism. Her poetry is prophetic while her timely submission is coincidentally in relation to the situation at hand. As the whole world bemoans the butchering of Black Lives. #BLACKLIVESMATTER. Legendary Poet AND Writer BANNERMAN is an advocate of peace building, singer of the truth and forgiveness, freedom writer and chronicler of life experiences through poetry and other literary arts deliverables. TIME OF THE POET REPUBLIC is sincerely gratified to feature legendary writings and prolific profile of one great peacemaker, Freedom Poet and widely published writer STACY BANNERMAN- (Blurb by Mbizo CHIRASHA)
FOR THE CHILDREN I LOVED
Crosses carved with baby’s wings
Section 60 of my soul
I kneel there and pray
Thanking God every day
For the children I loved
Far too much to have
No cannon fodder father figure
My kids kept MIA
From a dad who went away
Deconstructed by lies
No telling new eyes
In Thy name will ill be done
Never, ever undone
For the 12-year-old son
Who hung and swung
Decidedly dead, he decided to die
During Daddy’s second tour
War takes and breaks, makes trips without end
Kid picked up his passport when he called 911
Kitchen floor colored crimson
Mommy! Mommy! Mommy gone
That shotgun shot shot her straight through the heart
Front line hero shot his whole world apart.
Boy is yet another veteran of yet another war.
War be unto you, done to you
Oh Patron Saint of Patriotism
Please suffer my unborn child
The sins of the father
Sins of Uncle Sam
Stars and stripes and steel-needled demons
A crystal meth horse kicks the gates of hell
No newborn hidden in a field of burning snow
From snipers rifle sight unseen
Weapon, weeping, not discharged
Warfront gun on a Homefront hunt
Not counting casualties today
Battle dervish spins to butter
Thank God I did not drag my babies bawling
Hungry on the streets
And no one had a room for us
No help for us
No love for us
When no one had a light for us
Not one angel knew our names.
War without end
War a dead end
Ended my life
Ended my love, the love of my life
But not the lives of the children I loved
Far, far, far too much to have
Stacy Bannerman is the author of Homefront 911: How Families of Veterans Are Wounded by Our Wars (2015), https://www.amazon.com/Homefront-911-Families-Veterans-Wounded/dp/1628725699 and When the War Came Home (2006). She was a charter board member of Military Families Speak Out, testified before Congress three times, and singlehandedly spearheaded the introduction of the federal Military Family Leave Act in the FY 2010 NDAA. Her website is www.stacybannerman.com.
EMPTY BOOTS AND BABY SHOES
I am so tired of standing at memorials for soldiers; tired of weeping for the victims of this war.
I am tired of watching parents plant crosses for their dead children.
Day
After day
After godforsaken day.
I am tired of placing flowers in empty boots and baby shoes; of the way my body shakes at the first readings of the names that were added to the casualty count this week.
What’s wearing me out is bearing witness to this war.
This foreverness of death, and the unrelenting loss.
It drains my spirit to meet the widow’s eyes; to watch the fathers falter, falling to their knees…
Christ, that makes me weak.
To stand at the lip of the mouth of a grave that will never get enough
catching mothers tears, a nation driving by the dead, is exhausting to my soul.
I am deathly tired today.
Legendary PeaceMaker,STACY BANNERMAN is the author of HOMEFRONT 911: How Families of Veterans Are Wounded by Our Wars (2015) and WHEN THE WAR CAME HOME (2006). Stacy wrote and spearheaded the passage of several bills and was the sole force that got the National Military Family Leave Act sponsored and introduced by Congressman Adam Smith, D-WA, and passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. She broke the national silence about combat veteran domestic violence and is the only peace activist in history to testify before Congress three times. The Founder and CEO of Women’s EcoPeace, she is the creator of the Forgiveness Maps project www.forgivenessmaps.org.Ms. Bannerman is a nationally recognized leader in the effort to end the Iraq war and an SME on post-9/11 military families and caregivers of veterans. She was a charter Board member of Military Families Speak Out and has conducted more than 600 multimedia interviews, including Hardball with Chris Matthews, BBC, Deborah Norville on MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, and a feature story in the Washington Post.Stacy has an M.F.A. in Writing/Nonfiction, an M.S. in Women’s Studies from Minnesota State University, and a B.A. in International Relations. She was the creator and director of the performance art piece, Homefront 911: Military Family Monologues, which made history when it took the stage at the U.S. Capitol. Stacy has written more than 70 articles with bylines at The Progressive, The San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tacoma News Tribune, Truthout, and many others. She currently resides in Virginia, where she is working on her third book, second screenplay, and world peace.
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MBIZO CHIRASHA is a UNESCO -RILA Affiliate Artist(https://gramnet.wordpress.com/2020/06/01/new-unesco-rila-affiliate-artist-mbizo-chirasha/). FREEDOM SPEECH Fellow at PEN- Zentrum Deutschland. Poet in Residence at the Fictional Café (International publishing and literary digital space). 2019 Sotambe Festival Live Literature Hub and Poetry Café Curator. 2019 African Fellow for the International Human Rights Art Festival(https://ihraf.org/international-fellows ) , Essays Contributor to Monk Art and Soul Magazine in United Kingdom .Arts Features Writer at the International Cultural Weekly .Featured Writer Poet Activist at The Poet A Day(https://jamiededes.com/). Core Team Member and African Contributor to Bezine of Arts and Humanities(https://thebezine.com/) in USA. Flash/Short Fiction Writer for Squawk Back Publication(http://www.thesquawkback.com/2020/01/mbizo.html).Contributing Writer( Africa) to IHRAF Publishes-https://ihraf.org/ihraf-publishes.The Originator of the Zimbabwe We Want Poetry Campaign. Curator of MiomboPublishing Blog Journal(https://miombopublishing.wordpress.com/). Founder and Chief Editor of WOMAWORDS LITERARY PRESS. Founder and Curator of the Brave Voices Poetry Journal. Co-Editor of Street Voices Poetry triluangal collection( English , African Languages and Germany) initiated by Andreas Weiland in Germany. Poetry Contributor to AtunisPoetry.com in Belgium. African Contributor to DemerPress International Poetry Book Series in Netherlands. African Contributor to the World Poetry Almanac Poetry Series in Mongolia. His latest 2019 collection of experimental poetry A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT was released by Mwanaka Media and Publishing and is both in print, on Amazon.com and at is featured at African Books Collective. 2003 Young Literary Arts Delegate to the Goteborg International Book Fair Sweden (SIDA AFRICAN PAVILION) .2009 Poet in Residence of the International Conference of African Culture and Development (ICACD) in Ghana. 2009 Fellow to the inaugural UNESCO- Africa Photo- Novel Publishers and Writers Training in Tanzania. 2015 Artist in Residence of the Shunguna Mutitima International Film and Arts Festival in Livingstone, Zambia. A globally certified literary arts influencer, Writer in Residence and Recipient of the EU-Horn of Africa Defend Defenders Protection Fund Grant, Recipient of the Pen Deutschland Exiled Writer Grant. He is an Arts for Peace and Human Rights Catalyst, the Literary Arts Projects Curator, Poet, Writer, publicist is published in more 400 spaces in print and online
TIME OF THE POET REPUBLIC -An Internet based Poetry Center, Archiving Theme based Digital Poetry Anthologies Profiling Iconic Poets and Writers.
