by Thomas R. Smith
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AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News. |
Though our little lives go on, we’re aware
of a massive tearing—a fabric
we’d thought sturdy is being ripped by
unseen hands, cruel, immensely powerful.
This was not supposed to happen in our
country. The rent is pulling apart
the graves of those who died for a proud
ideal. My high school Memorial Days
in the band playing trombone at the cemetery
are torn down the middle, every
school morning that began with the Pledge
of Allegiance in shreds, and the history
book pages of our defeat of fascism
fallen to the ground like shotgunned birds.
Sit with it a moment and you’ll hear it
loud and close, a chainsaw biting into
our soul. Where are our old Scout masters,
our civics teachers who elevated
the virtues of our form of government?
Where are the leaders we were taught to respect?
Where are the generals sworn to uphold
the Constitution while the demented
king wages war on his own people? Where
is Betsy Ross with her needle to drive
into the hole in our nation’s heart
and stitch back together this wounded cloth?
of a massive tearing—a fabric
we’d thought sturdy is being ripped by
unseen hands, cruel, immensely powerful.
This was not supposed to happen in our
country. The rent is pulling apart
the graves of those who died for a proud
ideal. My high school Memorial Days
in the band playing trombone at the cemetery
are torn down the middle, every
school morning that began with the Pledge
of Allegiance in shreds, and the history
book pages of our defeat of fascism
fallen to the ground like shotgunned birds.
Sit with it a moment and you’ll hear it
loud and close, a chainsaw biting into
our soul. Where are our old Scout masters,
our civics teachers who elevated
the virtues of our form of government?
Where are the leaders we were taught to respect?
Where are the generals sworn to uphold
the Constitution while the demented
king wages war on his own people? Where
is Betsy Ross with her needle to drive
into the hole in our nation’s heart
and stitch back together this wounded cloth?
Thomas R. Smith’s recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press). He lives in western Wisconsin near the Kinnickinnic River.
