Poetry

July 7, 2017 Poetry , POETRY / FICTION

Reuters photo

 

By

Samuel Son

 

 

America, My America

 

 

Though you say I am not yours,

though you pissed all over my front door

with your black graffiti hissing

“Go back home chink!”

you are still my America.

 

Because I believe in you,

not in your greatness

but in your capacity to repent.

 

Though you think you are great — drunk with blood,

and puke your vulgarity, you are still my America.

For when you are sober, you are an inspired poet.

Your song of independence is painfully beautiful.

Though you don’t believe in your own rhetoric, I

believe in the words that constitute you, my doubting poet,

that we are all endowed by the creator with inalienable

rights no nation can deny, not even you, America.

for they are not your words which you can

undo or redo for words are greater than the poets that borrow them.

And one day, those words will cut your heart into repentance.

 

America, you are my America because you are a dreamer.

Did you not raise your small hands against the Behemoth Britain

because you dreamed of a land where lady Liberty called

the poor and refuse of this world into her shores,

shining an inviting light through the open seas?

 

We call it the American Dream, but it is older than you America.

Older than all your contradictions and nightmares,

older than your Jim Crow laws and burning crosses,

older than the Trans Atlantic slave trade, older than the

Red Man’s decimation, older than the rise of people who call themselves white,

older than nations fattening into self-importance and rapaciousness.

 

Prophet King did not awaken the dream.

King was awakened by the dream.

It was in Hughes for it is older

than the rivers in his body;

Old as the Tigris and Euphrates.

It gave visions to Crazy Horse,

of all races gathered around the tree of life,

singing the same song in different tongues.

It inspired Whitman to see in the grass,

the soul of the black and white in the same soil,

his life continuing to life on the boot soles,

the journey-work of the stars.

It stirred in Sojourner Truth

her song to go home as a shooting star.

 

It was the dream of Abraham, that both his sons

would put down their weapons and put him to the ground as brothers.

The dream is as old as Adam and Eve

who dreamed of Cain and Abel returning home for dinner.

 

One day, you will see me and see the error of your ways.

You will repent, that ancient practice of grasping Dream’s wings,

and I will welcome you home.

 

 

 

 

 

samuel-son

Samuel Son

Writer, Columnist, Poet, Preacher.

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