PAD Challenge: Warming Up II

 Here are three more poems I wrote as part of Robert Brewer's "countdown" to the annual April Poem-a-day Challenge:

T-minus 9: Write a "cause-and-effect" poem. I also used this week's word bank from the Sunday Whirl blog. The words were hope, water, inhumane, suppress, spring, wait, line, evil, soul, shame, race, vote. The words were obviously taken from a source that talked about the recent draconic voting bill passed by the GOP-controlled legislature in Georgia, which even makes it illegal to give out food and water to voters standing in long waiting lines, which will become routine with the restrictions that will go into effect. 

Thirst
 
It's now illegal in Georgia to give food and water to voters in line. - CNN
 
Hope is like water.
We all need it to survive,
and to deny it only makes us
thirstier. Inhumanely, you
suppress the flow of a spring,
but it will only keep bubbling up.
 
They wait patiently in line to drink.
There was an evil time not so long ago
where they could not even quench
their thirst where they wanted.
But their souls would not be broken.
And they will not now either.
 
You have not shamed their race;
you have only made them stronger,
and today they will march
to the voting booth, despite what you do
to stop them, and they will drink
from the clear fountain of freedom.

T-minus 4: Write a "universal" poem.

42
 
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
the supercomputer Deep Thought
is asked to ponder the question of
"life, the universe, and everything."
 
After eons of considered logic and reasoning,
it declares that the answer to that question is
"forty-two."
 
Forty-two also happened to be
the jersey number of Jackie Robinson,
whose place in history need not be explained here.
Suffice to say that now, every year,
every major league ballplayer wears
that otherwise-retired number on their jerseys
on Jackie Robinson Day.
 
What does baseball have to do
with life and the universe?
Well... everything.

T-minus 3: Write a "spirit of the stairs" poem. As Robert explains it, "...that moment when you come up with all the things you feel you should've said AFTER the moment has passed. Hence, you're on the stairs." So I kept it simple with a senryu:

what I should have said
echoes like a cruel spirit
in the stairwell