What Has Happened To The One I Love?

My first (and LAST) poem:

 

What Has Happened To The One I Love?

 

What has happened to the one I love?

The one that sent chills down my spine

Considering her heroic actions

The one that thrilled my soul knowing

What her people have endured and fought for.

That beacon of hope, trust and admiration

throughout the world?

That understanding that she (our America)

IS the standard bearer. The ideal

 

What has happened to the one I love…

What she has become under the lead of a few?

The merciless tyrant, torturously uncaring

Wrapped up in false flags… false hopes

Deluded by a false sanctimony,

“Fox’d” into self-superiority

telling her “she’s the greatest on the planet”

 

But I keep wondering by what measure.

Because she is “Christ’s Country”?

Crusading the Garden of Eden in search of Armageddon?

Defying all the Christ taught, lived and died for?

Calling light dark and dark light?

 

Are the blind leading the blind?

 

What has changed her… the one I love?

Or is it that I have changed?

Did I swallow the perpetual fear mongering

OR

Did I allow “Jingoism” disguised as “patriotism”

To swallow me?

 

 

What has happened to the one I love?

 

Find a mirror?

B’Man’s Redneck Poetry Reading

Yes, even this redneck from Tennessee has a high-falutin’ side. Poetry, even classical music (believe it or not, I am a concert trumpeter)… I even crack a book now and again (something more than Playboys, comic books and the Farmer’s Almanac).

But lately I have made friends with Jack Large (The Familographer) who turned me on to some poetry reading (he has several videos up at his Youtube Channel… jakvid).

So, while traveling this week, I was listening to PBR and ‘The Writer’s Almanac’  with Garrison Keeler came on and besides the cool biographical info he presents (birthdays, etc for poets and writers) he read a poem by Alicia Suskin Ostriker (from her book, ‘No Heaven’) and damn if it didn’t fit me to a T.

So much so that I knew that it would be my first poetry reading on YouTube and for here.

So, while I was out doing yard work yesterday, I realized that it just had to be recorded outside (maybe it was the birds chirping).

Fix

The puzzled ones, the Americans, go through their lives
Buying what they are told to buy,
Pursuing their love affairs with the automobile,

Baseball and football, romance and beauty,
Enthusiastic as trained seals, going into debt, struggling —
True believers in liberty, and also security,

And of course sex — cheating on each other
For the most part only a little, mostly avoiding violence
Except at a vast blue distance, as between bombsight and earth,

Or on the violent screen, which they adore.
Those who are not Americans think Americans are happy
Because they are so filthy rich, but not so.

They are mostly puzzled and at a loss
As if someone pulled the floor out from under them,
They’d like to believe in God, or something, and they do try.

You can see it in their white faces at the supermarket and the gas station
— Not the immigrant faces, they know what they want,
Not the blacks, whose faces are hurt and proud —

The white faces, lipsticked, shaven, we do try
To keep smiling, for when we’re smiling, the whole world
Smiles with us, but we feel we’ve lost

That loving feeling. Clouds ride by above us,
Rivers flow, toilets work, traffic lights work, barring floods, fires
And earthquakes, houses and streets appear stable

So what is it, this moon-shaped blankness?
What the hell is it? America is perplexed.
We would fix it if we knew what was broken.