I SING AMERICA: EXCERPTS
1. Excerpts from poetry, including Epilogue
This is our land.
I sing of it with awe,
Because it was the forfeiture of Time,
The splendid hybrid of a dawning age…
…I proclaim our heritage –
The stormy, stony portals of our coming,
The magnet of those needs which drew us here.
We are sons and daughters
From the wind-blown ships of Plymouth;
Upon that rock we stand –
That gaunt and awkward altar
Of our fathers' sacrifice…
* * *
…I sing of life that crept from east to west –
Of crooked creeks that drew us on
Like long, crook'd fingers beckoning;
Pounding rivers that sluiced their banks
And sliced the yielding clay,
And spliced the straining cord
Of frail community
That wound between the hills
And angled valleys…
* * *
CIVIL WAR
This is our land,
Stench of sulfur, rumble of canon,
A shifting tide of blood...
…I sketch the silent houses wreathed
In Blue-Gray smoke that knew no borders,
The gutted fields that blasphemed our fecundity;
Gnarled, black hands clenched against a cause
Too long dissembled...
WORLD WAR II: GERMANY
…The War begotten of War...
A storm had gathered in the hollow air –
A thunder that beat to the click of heels.
Sieg Heil!
I mourn the ravages of Hell –
Belched forth in all its crude delirium,
Delivered in a boxcar;
The hasty graves of all the counted dead
And the uncountable, known but to God...
* * *
1950's
This is our land...
We doctored up our laws and covenants,
Loosened up our hinges,
Burned our ancient bridges,
Tested out our principles – that ceaseless pull
Between tradition and transition –
The crossings and the pivot points
Between the weak and strong,
The poor and rich, the black and white of us:
What are the oaths the black man swears
Beneath his gray endurance?
What are the dreams the red man tells,
Staked to his baked red earth?
* * *
1960's
Camelot!
Ah, Camelot...
We were so hungry for illusion,
So ready for a fairy-tale-come-true.
Our aged warrior-patriot grinned
His famous grin,
Stepped from off the stage,
And young Lancelot smiled down upon us –
All our love of majesty come true –
Our very Yankee Doodle Dandy
Riding on a shining steed of Promise,
Flanked by his noble retinue…
* * *
VIET NAM
Saigon . . .
Still we breathe the deadly fumes,
Feel the punji...
We close our eyes and see the sheltering forests
That stir with sweltering malignity,
See both foe and bland protagonist
In every face…
… This is our land . . . our people...
And who betrayed whom is known to God alone,
For still we are too broken to be gifted
With such knowing.
* * *
The sickle has tumbled,
The iron curtain fallen to its rust...
…The hammer dropped at last -- to waiting hands,
To the coup de grace.
Crushed beneath a crumbled wall of mortar,
The monster died,
Full of age and the weight of ageless woe –
Fat and hollow as a Humpty-Dumpty…
* * *
AND BEYOND …
I sing of stubbled hayfields
That bristle yet against our hostile concrete;
The tendrils of our country roads
That tie us to our heartland,
Where the earth still yields, still burgeons,
Encompassed by our bright corrosion…
…But we mourn our great disharmony with earth;
The blights that we have played upon the land…
* * *
…This is our heritage,
And this I sing aloud,
Sing with a mighty fervor,
For this we sing in harmony
That carries like the gift
Of a choir well chosen:
The gift of the generations –
The freedom of the ties that bind so loosely;
The latitude to be, to be established, to become,
To raise our own voice
And hear it echo back with resonance,
Or to hear it falter and to speak again –
We who have gained the liberty
To do our good, or less;
The carte blanche
Of becoming what we choose...
* * *
Suffer the little children to come...
Suffer them – allow to them their suffrage...
The least of those among us –
The wretched refuse of our teeming ghettoes,
The fruit and fault of our easy liberties;
Victims of our transience,
Victims of our yearnings and our earnings,
Flotsam of our anger and despair…
* * *
…I sing a dirge of the darkness of our land –
Our hunger and our want...
* * *
This is our land –
We are our land, and more than our land –
For we have been landlord to the world,
Heartbeat of the world...
…We who would save the world –
We have bartered off too carelessly
Our own souls.
We have lost our certainties
In a world of hope and lies –
Each built too much upon the other…
* * *
This is our land…
We are sons and daughters yet
From those wind-blown ships of Plymouth;
We are pioneers again,
Spread across this cluttered wilderness –
And settlers still,
Our attics full of memories,
Our haylofts fragrant yet with seasoned hope…
…We were given earth enough,
Dreams and visions large enough to work with,
…This is the land we are –
And who we are –
Unrooted in our tangled tribulations –
Caught undone, unready
For the drought that we have come to –
* * *
I sing of Charity no man can legislate,
That comes as Gift, imparted from beyond us –
Beyond our blighted sensibilities.
I sing of traces of His majesty, His plenitude,
Still left among us,
Footing strong enough to build upon,
Grounding rich enough to plow again…
EPILOGUE
WRITTEN IN ASHES
This is our land,
A foothill called Golgotha –
Shattered stone and steel heaped high
Against a smoldering sky.
I sing a requiem – a kaddish...
Four silver birds
Plunged down the steamy air,
And changed our soul's horizon
For eternity.
They were meant to soar above
Our paltry hedges,
Across this rumpled quilt of land –
Stitching us up with thread invisible,
Neighboring us
From sea to shining sea...
But they roared to earth
With a death-scream
We had never heard before,
That echoes far beyond our rubbled shore,
Far beyond our struggling cognizance.
Beneath their grim trajectory
Lie our smoking ruins –
Our loves, our lives,
Our bones, our very heart-blood…
2. Excerpt from dialogue with Amerigo
RETURN TO THE MALL
The sun was bright and hot, and not a breath of wind stirred
down the long ramp. The dark stone slashed across the ground
like a wound gone dry, its blood sealed up within the scar.
“This is our wailing wall,” I thought. A polished slate, a
looking glass that cannot tell us who they were, or who we
are. 'Mirror, mirror, on the wall...'
I was far from solitary here; many passed me quietly, or stood
wrapped in their silences. Pilgrims all, we had no need of
words. Some there were who wept, or frowned too tightly,
their fingers groping – like the blind – tracing names etched
in the giant cuneiform.
“This is the wall -- the rift I have been searching for.” It was
his voice; I turned too quickly, and stumbled, sprawling
awkwardly against the hard, sun-warmed expanse. No one
seemed to notice; perhaps too many fell too often against its
implacable finality.
He leaned, and hauled me slowly up, his hands not cold as I
had feared; I glanced at him with some chagrin. “I'm kind of
clumsy – I wasn't prepared...”
His eyes were on the monument. “No one was.”
A breeze came suddenly, from west to east, whetting along the
sharp escarpment. Now misery fell between us, dark and heavy
as the rock of names we leaned against. He touched the surface
hesitantly.
“Viet Nam . . . The great deceit.”
His fingers trembled against a name: Vasquez, Tonio B., PO3
USN. “A sailor, like me . . . Perhaps his father's mother was
of my lineage . I wonder . . . did this poor lad know of me, of
my deceit?”
I scoffed at his far-fetched association; “But this was war; you
were an explorer . . .”
His bitter laugh exploded like a sudden land-mine: “All
things being equal -- as they are, in this great nation -- we are
apt to be equal in these and other misadventures, we grand
pursuers.”
“What are you saying?”
“War is an admirable pursuit to those whose grubstake is at
stake. The siren call of gain -- of power -- is our irresistible
beckoning – and our final reckoning -- we ‘Schiffers im
kleinen Schiffen’.”¹
I hated suddenly this dark man with his dark forebodings:
“You tilt the scales heavily with your loaded hand. We were
not, are not fortune-seekers, not tyrannizers nor conquerors!”
“Your exercise of futile power perhaps was more akin the
pride of friend Colombo -- he who damned to death by casual
push and shove the 'savages' he stumbled over -- and lorded
over -- in his gold-lust. Perhaps they were brute savages, or
gentle folk, or both, no doubt.”
He swept his hand against the silent stone; “Your pride was
not my pride, nor his . . . and yet -- and yet . . . our lust
becomes the gun aimed at the target, our fear the trigger
cocked, I think. And so we fall, and think that we must lie.
We lie to extricate our lust from history.”
My heart pounded with the anger that his voice drew up,
spilling from some rankling place within. I spit out my wrath
upon him.
“Your vicious words conceal more than they clarify. You are
like a sniper, picking off survivors when they raise their
bloody heads, or pumping the corpse with lead to make your
point. Look at this testimony to despair! Where was lust for
power played out here – what did these boys yearn for on the
killing fields, what did they seek in the rotting jungles except
another rotten day to live through?”
His face was suddenly contorted, his words a whisper that the
wind snatched: “Ah, my friend! Do not forget -- no, never!
These were the gentle savages...”
I looked down the dark span before me, my heart as broken as
their bartered lives, and tried to speak; “Whose lust . . . ?”
But no one was beside me, and the wind keened softly through
the day's debris.
* * *
¹Heine, Heinrich, 1797-1856. “Die Lorelei”: “...Den Schiffer im kleinen
Schiffe...” (“...The boatman in his small craft...”)