by Martha Deed
1 The Students
Tonight!
Gigantic Rally
at Madison Square Garden
Our high school band
invited to play
Admission Free
We will march up Eighth Ave
in a ticker tape parade
President Eisenhower in person!
We will play “Hail to the Chief”
for real
Was I playing clarinet that year?
We will play in Madison Square Garden
as sure as
as sure as the Knicks
to entertain the crowd
Or was I playing glockenspiel?
2 The School Authorities and the Parents
We’ll let them go
even with the usual field trip worries
the bus could break down
a chaperon on the sauce
a kid throws up on the bus
or starts a fight
after overcoming the fear of partisanship
we will not worry about the bomb threat
phoned to the New York Daily News
an hour before the rally began
because we won’t know about it
Four years ago
we wandered wearily
in the darkness
of a drifting war
because there is no internet to scare us bloodless
yet
we wondered how long a government
could effectively lead the free world
when it no longer commanded
the pride of its own people
We have welcomed an effective attack on inflation
Even as he speaks
I have seen the face of our land
soil, rivers and forests
their richness and power conserved
and promises
to serve our national interest
to promote understanding in the world
to give new validity
to America’s role of leadership
in this world
they won’t remember anything he said.
3 Two days later
The letter from The White House
The letter copied for each band member
The words forgotten
The letter kept
Martha Deed’s third poetry collection Haunted By Martha was released by FootHills Publishing, July 2023. She has published ten books (poetry, mixed media, non-fiction) and ten chapbooks along with inclusion in more than 20 poetry anthologies. Individual poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Earth’s Daughters, First Literary Review—East, Shampoo, Gypsy, and many others.
