7.4.22

by Don Brunnquell

Terrified paradegoers fled the Highland Park, Ill., Fourth of July event after shots were fired Monday. At least six people were dead, more than 40 people were hospitalized and a gunman was at large Monday afternoon after shooting Fourth of July paradegoers from a roof in this Chicago suburb, authorities said. (Photo: Lynn Sweet/AP via The Washington Post, July 4, 2022)

            In the dark times

            Will there be singing?

            Yes, there will be singing.

            About the dark times.

—Bertolt Brecht, “Motto”

 

Oh, say can you see, on this day

we celebrate what we used to call

one nation, with liberty and justice

for all, from every mountainside

let us sing all the songs our country

has earned, not only O beautiful

for spacious skies, but the mourning

dirge for today’s dead in Chicago parading

beside us with the children of Uvalde

and the spirit of George Floyd, not only

“Columbia the Gem of the Ocean”

but Woody’s “I Ain’t  Got No Home,”

and with fitting irony This land is your

land, this land is my land, recalling

whose land this really was, every verse

written on the mounds of the old bones.

Perhaps sing “You’re a Grand Old Flag”

not for the flag worship of the title,

but the lines, forever in peace

may you wave, and never a boast

or brag, sing “We Shall Overcome,”

but also the source of its tune,

“No More Auction Block For Me.”

All the songs need to be sung,

then return to “America the Beautiful,”

the closing lines of the second verse,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law. 

Don Brunnquell is a poet working in Saint Paul, MN after careers in pediatric psychology and bioethics.  He is one of the coordinators of the Midstream Poetry Series in the Twin Cities. 

ALL THOSE PATRIOTIC SONGS

by Alan Walowitz

. . . In a democracy, you can only ignore the will of the people for so long and get away with it.                                                

                                                                                                         --John Boehner

Grammar School we sung them 

till the vocal cords popped from our throats,

such scrawny things we were, 

Adam’s apples bobbing, toes tapping,

the girls lined up the other side of the room

their skirts gently swaying in the breeze the radiators made—

all to please those witches, either evil or kind,

who had us in their clutches all day, a year at a time,

these ladies out of Normal School—Miss Johnson and Cochran,

Mrs. Murtaugh and Golsner—with their black high-top lace-up shoes

and penciled brows and rouged cheeks

that always made them look like they’d come through a storm—

and in the wake of the war, maybe they had.

My Country is of Thee—what the hell did that mean?—

O, say does the Star Spangled Ba-a-nner yet wave?

Just look in the corner of the room

where the flag’s hanging limp as the janitor’s mop.

God Bless America, never mentioning the guy who wrote it

was born on the other side.

And shouting the refrain, This Is My Country,

giving it all we had, just like the Mitch Miller record

we’d learned it from. 

They even said we might get to build it.

Though one look now, soft and creaky most mornings,

lovers of the easy life—you’ll know we didn’t help much. 

But our grandparents and parents did—

after hunkered down in steerage, a long, bitter crossing.

Still, that’s not walking from Guatemala

one kid in hand and another tugging at her breast,

and climbing in the back of a rickety old school bus 

to cross pitted roads and streams

and sleeping in rotted VW vans 

along with the hosos and the other takers

who might as soon rape you as get you there.

That’s courage worthy of sparklers and Roman candles

and bottle-rockets whistling, and bombs bursting in air.  

All those patriotic songs--

This is my country! we sung, sometimes even shouted.

Loud and proud, our teachers told us.

Build that wall, my ass!

We say, what Woody Guthrie said,

This land is your land, this land is my land—

you can only hold us off so long. 

Alan Walowitz has been published various places on the web and off.  His work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2017 and 2018 and he is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook Exactly Like Love is available from Osedax Press, and his full-length book The Story of the Milkman and other poems is published by Truth Serum Press.