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America,
America, I have seen your rich-crowned frontal plains, your
lavish placards, your glittering shop widows. I have seen
your Easter clothes, your clipped lawns, swimming pools,
lemonade, ice cream, and baseball. I have seen your carpeted
dens, skylights, ice-making Frigidaires, formicaed countertops
and remodeled bathrooms. I have known the backyard barbecues,
the tire swings, the asphalted Sea Worlds, Wild Animal Kingdoms,
fresh driveways, palm trees. I have smelled the smell of
treated pine siding, bounced your trampolines and pogo sticks,
fished your rivers, parked in your cul-de-sacs, and eaten
your cobbed corn.
America,
I have seen your rust belt, stretching from Baltimore to
Boston, asphalted ribbons connecting the busy and gray metropolises,
the buildings cubbied and pigeon-holed, steel-framed and
riveted bridges, muddy currents, abandoned freight cars,
billboards, wilted trees roadside, rusted city halls sweating
corruption like anti-freeze, abandoned cars and homes.
I have
tasted the Chinese-Cambodian-Italian-Hassidic-Polish foods.
America,
I have seen your gentle and antebellumed South, North Carolinian
jack pines, Virginia hawks, salt breezes and pine cones,
smiling bank tellers and pleasant gas attendants, the lakes
and grills, cliffs, dirt roads, family reunions and shirt-sleeved
winters. Rockingchairs have creaked under lavender skies;
in the summer your pools have cooled my skin. I have encountered
the hostile southern police.
I have
traveled your farmlands, seen the plotted and plowed fields,
the weathered rail fences, the windmills and silos, wind-blown
truck stops, freight, the bittersweet-woven roadsides, sun
setting like coal fire, Swedish plain settlements, and the
wind wind wind filling souls like sails in a truck stop
at dusk. Fields have stretched at sundown like a brotherly
quilt of love.
America,
America, I have traveled your western lands, the cut canyons,
deserts, the rocked mountains, forested lowlands, scrub-brush,
buffalo, SUVs, and campsites. I have seen the deer, elk,
South Dakota bluegrass prairies, steers, cracked ground,
geysers, canyoned walls and whitewatered rivers, your thunderstorms
and floods, your winds have shaken my car. Over Idaho alfalfa
fields there has been a rainbow, and in prayer I have knelt
beside a rippled lake. Upon me the bison has lowered its
horns. The space and stars have quieted all quietings, and
glittering midnights illumined hidden paths.
America,
I have traveled your yellow-grained coast, felt the tension
of politics trying to control a state larger than most countries
yet more relaxed, surfed your oceans, climbed your dunes,
traversed your brown-skinned cliffs, dived lakes and breathed
moss-grown forests, passed the hills of golden blowing grains
into the cut, mountained and meadowed north. I have tasted
the blackberries of Oregon, up the coast have felt the Hindu-Christian-Muslim-gay-straight-greenpeace-Hollywood-Mexican-American
war.
America,
your Seattle lights recede in the distance.
America,
I have seen your gray-faced north. I have traveled the rocky
Canada road past lakes and tundra pines, to the border of
your snowbound state. I have loved its green-flecked mountains,
the gray rippled sea, the tides, beluga whales, and glaciers.
I have rafted the freezing rivers. The salmon harvest passed
under my fingers: chop, gut, wash, rack. Your sun has lingered
all night in the sky; the northern lights have twisted,
exploded, and kissed, your moose, elk, sheep, and bear trotted
on streets; a gathering of houses was dwarfed by wilderness
and stars. I have slept on lonely winded beaches, listening
to the thrum of iceberged waves, wild melodies, great empty
seas. Their emptiness has been my own.
America,
America, as you have shown me the clean-cheeked face, so
I have witnessed your underbelly, the grimy nails, the demons
of your heart. Witness your cities: inner-city Detroit,
hollowed-out shell wasteland weeds broken walls and bottles
guns rap and gin; Times Square, maddened rush of orange-lit
flesh; crumbling bricks, corner "pharmacies",
desecrated buildings, needles, rum, and dice. I have taught
in your schools and felt their anger, seen your litter,
known your illiteracy. Witness your faces of poverty, faces
you see but choose to ignore, the faces you freed then abandoned
to fate. Witness their fathers in jail, children having
children, minds slowed by TV and potato chips; parentless
young, bicycle gangs and husbandless moms.
Witness
the darkness of your insides: tend it not and it will haunt,
grow, and collide...
with the outside.
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