I was reading some political commentary poems from the "Wild Ideas" section of my book "Cocktails in the Wild," when after concluding a long poem titled "My America," someone began clapping and the whole room immediately joined.
Poetry readings of the serious sort are not often interrupted by applause. That was certainly the first time it happened for me.
And that's reason enough for me to reprint the poem, "My America," parts i and ii, below. The poem was written during the Presidential campaign of 2016, when it appeared to me and many others that our system of electing leaders was exposing an ugly national underbelly, but well before the vote. The poem was originally published in Verse-Virtual.com in the fall of 2016.
My thanks for opportunity to read to Plymouth Public Library director Jen Harris, outreach librarian Tom Cummiskey; to author/poet pal Judy Campbell, who brought both friends and some unbeatable chocolate fudge (the friends were good too). And to Anne, who timed the photos in the power-point down to the second.
Some folks even bought copies of my poetry books for Christmas presents. Is that the holiday spirit of giving, or what?
My America (i)
("There died a myriad... For a botched civilization"
-- Ezra Pound)
Looking at you these
fallen days (or me in the mirror)
I join the ranks of your
disappointed admirers
We are no longer saving
the world
we are saving our jobs
Frankly, I am sick of
the whole 'greatest country in the world' chest-thumpery
and if there were
somewhere else to go I would go there
but (still true) if you
are not part of the solution
you are part of the
problem
and I know which part I
am
America, my
transcendental gender-free inamorata, you are my sole support
I am one of your
pensioned ex-lovers, as
glimpsed in the film
version of what-we-now-really-are, walking the boardwalk
somewhere desolate, like
Atlantic City,
the New Jersey Crimea,
sucking up air like one of Chekov's washed-up emigres,
after the rodeo, after
the gold rush, after the film festival, the short-series Conventions,
after the failed
uprising, after the media has packed up and gone home
to spend a quiet evening
in the hotel with their phones
one of your disappointed
vampires in need of a bloody fix,
scanning the pre-dawn streets
for Ginsberg set-piece atrocities,
the best minefields of
America, dodging gunned-up, hyped-up, trumped-up
scaredy-cops shooting
black men because we are afraid of black men
(why shouldn't we be?
given all we have done to them?)
and are of course still
doing with fanny-pats of approval from race-card Republican judges
America, ghoulish
dreamboat, ancient lover gone in the teeth,
eager for wounds to lick
cuz you like the taste
you grow comfortable
with the deaths of others
They are dying in Aleppo
Other countries (nursing
their own broken mirrors) ask,
"What are they are
thinking in America?"
They are not thinking in
America
Thinking is not done in
America,
some calculation of
course, some texting, some advertising,
some truly boorish
emoting
It's always about us,
isn't it?
If not, then why are you
bothering me?
My America! after the
big affair, after the ball is over,
your kick-line of sulky
dwarfs cleaning up behind the parade
You were young once
We were all young once
Your bright young men
wore wigs and tight pants, showed a leg
Ladies learned to smoke,
swear, dance and dip to apocalyp-stick swingtime
America, your century is
over
You open your faded arms
to tinpot dictators,
make eyes at banana
republics, don the latest looks from funhouse mirrors,
worship pigs who despise
everything you ever stood for
... all for a botched
democracy, a menopausal male
gone grouchy in the
knees, stiff in the frontal lobe
You have no use for
carping critics
who spend time spooning
with their buddy Google,
the single pop culture
lightweight who can stand their company
Write me a check and
I'll get out of town
My America (ii)
My America, however, is a guy with a distinctly 'different'
name
that is to say clearly
not Anglo-Saxon (a tongue with more than enough funny names of its own),
for example
banjo player 'Bela Fleck'
combining Hungarian
roots with the Appalachian mountain music that now defines his instrument,
itself a melding of
deep-flowing currents, Celtic, English, African-American
Who travels to Africa to
trace the banjo's genealogy
in hide-covered stringed
instruments brought here by slaves
In the film* you can see
the respect in his eyes as his fingers work to copy
a finger-picking rhythm
pecked at hummingbird speed by a Malian guitar player
and the respect in the
eyes of the African players of the akonting
(a three-stringed,
long-necked banjo antecedent)
as they see what Fleck
can do with the modern version
The country, that is, of
Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang, my Quincy Chinese neighbors
whose grandfathers visit
to play basketball with preschool grandsons,
the lady who shouts with
the half-dozen words we share that I have
planted my garden in the
wrong place. 'What are these?' she points. 'Nothing to eat?'
The country of my wife's
grandfather Meier who escaped the czar's army
to carry a sewing
machine to work in Brooklyn
My close-mouthed father,
born here in unlucky times,
who never once in our
hearing spoke a word of his Depression childhood,
but survived to give us
what he lacked and carried his secrets to the grave
The Nisei soldiers who
stormed up mountains in Italy to take Nazi forts
while their parents were
interned somewhere in the ambivalently 'Great' Plains,
and those with names
like DiMaggio whose mothers were forced to register each year as enemy aliens
and
whose travel-restricted fathers could no longer visit their sons' restaurants
while they fought in
Europe and the Pacific
Of citizen Khizr Khan,
whose officer son died protecting those who served under him
in Afghanistan,
a country much like this
one in having too many wars. (My America can be improved.)
And Zarif Khan, who
founded an Afghani community in of all places Wyoming,
by taking advantage of a
collection of opportunities such as the ranch-hands' pent-up demand
for fresh tamales, the
stock market, freedom of travel, the right to vote, a collection
found perhaps nowhere
else but in these United States
Of Darlene Love who went
from house cleaner, to backup singer, to contributing
"Christmas (Baby
Please Come Home)," to the nation's permanent holiday playlist
The country where an
author (Barbara Ehrenreich)
could write a book
titled "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America"
and not be hounded by
Putin's police
The country of Cesar Chavez, Joan
Baez, Sonia Sotomayor, Roberto Clemente, Rita Moreno
A country of
'climbing-up' ordinary heroes, open minds, thinkers and doers, money makers and
music makers
with names our own Moms
and Dads never heard of,
but learned to play nice
with for the good of the whole, e pluribus unum
transcending the clans
and tribalisms that set other worlds on fire
because we were the others, the strangers, the newcomers once, the genuine alien nation
because we were the others, the strangers, the newcomers once, the genuine alien nation
*"Throw Down Your
Heart," 2008
links to my two poetry books:
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