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Scroll down for a collection of In Loving Memory Poems about American states, presented in loving memory of the poets who created them.
Above image: Langston Hughes
ALABAMA
DAYBREAK IN ALABAMA
by Langston Hughes
***
When I get to be a composer
I'm gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I'm gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I'm gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.
ALASKA
AUTUMN IN THE ALASKA RANGE
by Tom Sexton
***
Drive north when the braided glacial rivers
have begun to assume their winter green.
When crossing Broad Pass, you might see
the shimmer of caribou moving on a distant ridge
or find a dark abacus of berries in the frost
on the trail to Summit Lake. Beyond this,
the endless mountains curving like a scimitar.
And in the querulous mind, the yearning heart
a sudden immeasurable calm.
ARIZONA
ARIZONA DESERT RAIN - A POEM
By Don Gray
***
Solemn, solemn is the world.
Rocks and trees deep-rooted stand,
fixed in broad and buxom earth,
twist and spread of limb and girth
in slanting, pouring rain.
Wind shakes the trees in ruffled stance
like misbehavior shoulder-grasped.
Lightning breaks, streaks earth and sky,
sheet metal tearing in a hurricane.
Atmosphere thick, become opaque,
slashing rain and pelting hail
scribe the breadth and depth of air
in diagonal wild display.
Pocked and wrinkled water pools
the brown and tawny grit
in unaccustomed moisture sheen,
the desert never much like this;
colors rich and sodden green.
Palo verde trees, mesquite,
twisted by pressuring life and death,
fair days and foul, staunchly
unperturbed by blanching rain.
Greasewood heavy-laden
with blueberries of light
that drip and fall in harvest lush and ripe.
Great drops ride the prickly pear
like roller coasters upside down,
horses' saddles fallen under,
liquid tumors swollen large
that fall and burst upon the ground;
balloons aimed by bomb-sight kids
from second story windows.
The long rain ends, and rivulets
course the yard as larger washes
rage and roar, carve the desert sand.
The woodpecker's clarion call
duets with distant tractor
in cold air cleansed by recent rain.
Wind-whipped clouds like great black lids
reflect in grey-brown mirrors
strewn the length of desert path
my black dog ripples with her tongue.
Trails left by rushing waters
seem mile-wide deltas viewed eye-high,
black with iron ore dark as dog
whose claw-punched prints set right the scale
of tiny flows that minor rut to desert depths.
Bright, bright sky-filled light,
sun-scribed sparrow on a barbed-wire fence;
two javelina, shining hackles rise,
stand splay-footed, flat-nose test the wind.
Quartz gleams dazzle in glittering sand;
the thrasher's whistled succulence,
a juicy morsel well tasted.
The sun, a fiery, shattered orb,
destroys the black saguaro.
ARKANSAS
MY ARKANSAS
By Lindsay Wirth
***
Little Rock in my pocket
hovering honey bee over the heartspace
like the june fireflies in nana’s mason jars
twinkle blink until they fall sleeping
like snowflakes patterned powdered sugar.
into the secret, locked watermelon
rind of remembries. i go each time i see
the first signs of rain that thunder perfume
as the grass bows toward the mountain.
and mom’s crayola tulips, pink still reaching
each spring towards the tiny tear torrents
beading down and buoyed manila,
the wintry river traffic string wipers
and the headlights dashing them home.
CALIFORNIA
THE CHANGING LIGHT
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti
***
The changing light
at San Francisco
is none of your East Coast light
none of your
pearly light of Paris
The light of San Francisco
is a sea light
an island light
And the light of fog
blanketing the hills
drifting in at night
through the Golden Gate
to lie on the city at dawn
And then the halcyon late mornings
after the fog burns off
and the sun paints white houses
with the sea light of Greece
with sharp clean shadows
making the town look like
it had just been painted
But the wind comes up at four o'clock
sweeping the hills
And then the veil of light of early evening
And then another scrim
when the new night fog
floats in
And in that vale of light
the city drifts
anchorless upon the ocean
Above: Lawrence Ferlinghetti
COLORADO
SPIRIT THAT FORM'D THIS SCENE
By Walt Whitman
***
Spirit that form'd this scene,
These tumbled rock-piles grim and red,
These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks,
These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness,
These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own,
I know thee, savage spirit--we have communed together,
Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
Was't charged against my chants they had forgotten art?
To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse?
The lyrist's measur'd beat, the wrought-out temple's
grace--column and polish'd arch forgot?
But thou that revelest here--spirit that form'd this scene,
They have remember'd thee.
Above: Walt Whitman
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CONNECTICUT
A WINTER WITHOUT SNOW
by J. D. McClatchy
***
Even the sky here in Connecticut has it,
That wry look of accomplished conspiracy,
The look of those who've gotten away
With a petty but regular white collar crime.
When I pick up my shirts at the laundry,
A black woman, putting down her Daily News,
Wonders why and how much longer our luck
Will hold. "Months now and no kiss of the witch."
The whole state overcast with such particulars.
For Emerson, a century ago and farther north,
Where the country has an ode's jagged edges,
It was "frolic architecture." Frozen blue-
Print of extravagance, shapes of a shared life
Left knee-deep in transcendental drifts:
The isolate forms of snow are its hardest fact.
Down here, the plain tercets of provision do,
Their picket snow-fence peeling, gritty,
Holding nothing back, nothing in, nothing at all.
Down here, we've come to prefer the raw material
Of everyday and this year have kept an eye
On it, shriveling but still recognizable--
A sight that disappoints even as it adds
A clearing second guess to winter. It's
As if, in the third year of a "relocation"
To a promising notch way out on the Sunbelt,
You've grown used to the prefab housing,
The quick turnover in neighbors, the constant
Smell of factory smoke--like Plato's cave,
You sometimes think--and the stumpy trees
That summer slighted and winter just ignores,
And all the snow that never falls is now
Back home and mixed up with other piercing
Memories of childhood days you were kept in
With a Negro schoolmate, of later storms
Through which you drove and drove for hours
Without ever seeing where you were going.
Or as if you've cheated on a cold sickly wife.
Not in some overheated turnpike motel room
With an old flame, herself the mother of two,
Who looks steamy in summer-weight slacks
And a parrot-green pullover. Not her.
Not anyone. But every day after lunch
You go off by yourself, deep in a brown study,
Not doing much of anything for an hour or two,
Just staring out the window, or at a patch
On the wall where a picture had hung for ages,
A woman with planets in her hair, the gravity
Of perfection in her features--oh! her hair
The lengthening shadow of the galaxy's sweep.
As a young man you used to stand outside
On warm nights and watch her through the trees.
You remember how she disappeared in winter,
Obscured by snow that fell blindly on the heart,
On the house, on a world of possibilities.
FLORIDA
A FLORIDA NIGHT
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
***
Win' a-blowin' gentle so de san' lay
low,
San' a little heavy f'om de rain,
All de pa'ams a-wavin' an' a-weavin' slow,
Sighin' lak a sinnah-soul in pain.
Alligator grinnin' by de ol' lagoon,
Mockin'-bird a-singin' to de big full moon,
'Skeeter go a-skimmin' to his fightin' chune
(Lizy Ann 's a-waitin' in de lane!).
Moccasin a-sleepin' in de cyprus swamp;
Need n't wake de gent'man, not fu' me.
Mule, you need n't wake him w'en you
switch an' stomp,
Fightin' off a 'skeeter er a flea.
Florida is lovely, she 's de fines' lan'
Evah seed de sunlight f'om de Mastah's
han',
'Ceptin' fu' de varmints an' huh fleas an'
san'
An' de nights w'en Lizy Ann ain' free.
Moon 's a-kinder shaddered on de melon
patch;
No one ain't a-watchin' ez I go.
Climbin' of de fence so 's not to click de
latch
Meks my gittin' in a little slow.
Above: Paul Laurence Dunbar
GEORGIA
NOCTURNE: GEORGIA COAST
by Daniel Whitehead Hicky
***
The shrimping boats are late today;
The dusk has caught them cold.
Swift darkness gathers up the sun,
And all the beckoning gold
That guides them safely into port
Is lost beneath the tide.
Now the lean moon swings overhead,
And Venus, salty-eyed.
They will be late an hour or more,
The fishermen, blaming dark's
Swift mischief or the stubborn sea,
But as their lanterns' sparks
Ride shoreward at the foam's white rim,
Until they reach the pier
I cannot say if their catch is shrimp,
Or fireflies burning clear.
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HAWAII
JIGSAW: SECOND NARROWS BRIDGE AT RUSH HOUR
by Sharon Thesen
***
Seamless afternoon to evening across the bridge beyond
across the other bridge curving dark landfall lights
upon the sea, our mother swims backward, Earle Birney
smokes a pipe upon the lookout & pens a line in boots
atomic city below, Aldebaran above
in your eyes Pacific skies take me to paradise please
I want to live
in a little grass shack in Ha-aha-Hawaii
where the hula hula hula goes hucka hucka hucka by
and the hula hula huckity-huckin'
hacka hacka hacka, by
our missing person of the blue mountains
and Liberian freighters, potash proceedings
& queen mattresses at unbelievable prices on the radio
opinions & traffic hell of twilight
continuously heading home
in a dome of judgement and advice, oh caller
with a problem, Dr. Laura says you're slime
and that you are a bum but I say you're some hard part
of the puzzle rigged up by the moon and
feathery evergreen branches
complicated wings full of blue shadows
a foot at least of shimmering ocean each small
notched piece a dark blue mystery.
But who would have the patience?
IDAHO
IDAHO REQUIEM
By Ron McFarland (for Robert Lowell)
***
Out here, we don't talk about culture,
we think we are. We nurtured Ezra Pound
who ran from us like hell
and never came back. You
never came at all. You
will never know how clever
we never are out here.
You never drank red beer.
You never popped a grouse
under a blue spruce just because it was there.
Tell us about Schopenhauer and your friends
and fine old family. We left ours
at the Mississippi, have no names left
to drop. We spend our time
avoiding Californians and waiting
for the sage to bloom, and when it does
we miss the damn things half the time.
When a stranger comes in we smile
and say, "Tell us about yourself."
Then we listen real close.
But you would say, "I've said what I have to say."
Too subtle, perhaps, for a can of beer,
too Augustan for the Snake River breaks.
But how do you know this wasn't just
the place to die? Why not have those
kinfolk ship your bones out here, just
for irony's sake? We keep things plain
and clear because of the mountains.
Our mythology comes down to a logger
stirring his coffee with his thumb.
ILLINOIS
LIVING IN THE MIDDLE
by Dave Etter
***
Here in Alliance, Illinois,
I'm living in the middle,
standing on the Courthouse lawn
in the middle of town,
in the middle of my life,
a self-confessed middlebrow,
a member of the middle class,
and of course Middle Western,
the middle, you see, the middle,
believing in the middle way,
standing here at midday
in the middle of the year,
breathing the farm-fragrant air
of Sunflower County,
in the true-blue middle
of middle America,
in the middle of my dreams.
INDIANA
DEAD CENTER
by Rachel Contreni Flynn
***
August in Indiana:
a heavy moon hung over space
where there was almost nothing
but one big town at dead center.
Grasshoppers popped under tires,
the trees swelled with grackles,
and I amused myself with windmills --
the solitary geometry of glint and spin,
slowing then standing motionless
until the sky raised its dark fist.
The autumn my mother left
a coldness opened . . .
Beans dried to snakes' tails in the fields,
and my chest filled with rust.
In the snow I walked the pastures
in an orange poncho
my father could see from the house.
Once I told him to stop waving at me.
Once I said maybe I’ll just keep walking.
And once I slid the poncho
to the near-frozen middle of Moots Pond
just to watch him run from the house
barefoot and wild.
IOWA
IOWA
By Robbie Klein
***
It never completely gets dark on those back roads.
There are stars, deceptively few.
And velvet consumes and velvet erupts:
the softness is the leaves and the dirt paths and stables and skin. And eyes.
The dark places, the secret places: abrupt, always, fleeting
but indelibly there, like a muscle memory.
The ridiculous and impudent course of years means nothing:
the touch is the same, the taste. Iowa's sweet ground. I close my eyes to the
darkness and fall into it more and awake to the street disappearing into
fields and lost time.
A drive through the cemetery, a different place now
Winding up the hill marking a route in the dark with the pond
To stand breathless at the crest, arms wide open
I chart movements with a cartographer's conscience:
throw open my shirt and open my self to the sky flawed and stitched
and whole
and welcome my mother and forgive my father and
know the slap shock of being born.
KANSAS
CROSSING KANSAS BY TRAIN
By Donald Justice
***
The telephone poles
Have been holding their
Arms out
A long time now
To birds
That will not
Settle there
But pass with
Strange cawings
Westward to
Where dark trees
Gather about a
Water hole this
Is Kansas the
Mountains start here
Just behind
The closed eyes
Of a farmer’s
Sons asleep
In their work clothes
KENTUCKY
AFTER A VISIT
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
***
I be'n down in ole Kentucky
Fur a week er two, an' say,
'Twuz ez hard ez breakin' oxen
Fur to tear myse'f away.
Allus argerin' 'bout fren'ship
An' yer hospitality--
Y'ain't no right to talk about it
Tell you be'n down there to see.
See jest how they give you welcome
To the best that's in the land,
Feel the sort o'grip they give you
When they take you by the hand.
Hear 'em say, "We're glad to have you,
Better stay a week er two;"
An' the way they treat you makes you
Feel that ev'ry word is true.
Feed you tell you hear the buttons
Crackin' on your Sunday vest;
Haul you roun' to see the wonders
Tell you have to cry for rest.
Drink yer health an' pet an' praise you
Tell you git to feel ez great
Ez the Sheriff o' the county
Er the Gov'ner o' the State.
Wife, she sez I must be crazy
'Cause I go on so, an' Nelse
He 'lows, "Goodness gracious! daddy,
Cain't you talk about nuthin' else?"
Well, pleg-gone it, I'm jes tickled,
Bein' tickled ain't no sin;
I've b'en down in ole Kentucky
An' I want o' go ag'in.
LOUISIANA
IN LOUISIANA
by Albert Bigelow Paine
***
The long, gray moss that softly swings
In solemn grandeur from the trees,
Like mournful funeral draperies,--
A brown-winged bird that never sings.
A shallow, stagnant, inland sea,
Where rank swamp grasses wave, and where
A deadliness lurks in the air,--
A sere leaf falling silently.
The death-like calm on every hand,
That one might deem it sin to break,
So pure, so perfect,--these things make
The mournful beauty of this land.
MAINE
MAGIC
By Louis Untermeyer
***
We passed old farmer Boothby in the field.
Rugged and straight he stood; his body steeled
With stubbornness and age. We met his eyes
That never flinched or turned to compromise,
And “Luck,” he cried, “good luck!”—and waved an arm,
Knotted and sailor-like, such as no farm
In all of Maine could boast of ; and away
He turned again to pitch his new-cut hay . . .
We walked on leisurely until a bend
Showed him once more, now working toward the end
Of one great path; wearing his eighty years
Like banners lifted in a wind of cheers.
Then we turned off abruptly—took the road
Cutting the village, the one with the commanding
View of the river. And we strode
More briskly now to the long pier that showed
Where the frail boats were kept at Indian Landing.
In the canoe we stepped; our paddles dipped
Leisurely downwards, and the slim bark slipped
More on than in the water. Smoothly then
We shot its nose against the rippling current,
Feeling the rising river’s half-deterrent
Pull on the paddle as we turned the blade
To keep from swerving round; while we delayed
To watch the curious wave-eaten locks;
Or pass, with lazy turns, the picnic-rocks ....
Blue eels flew under us, and fishes darted
A thousand ways; the once broad channel shrunk.
And over us the wise and noble-hearted
Twilight leaned down; the sunset mists were parted,—
And we, with thoughts on tiptoe, slunk
Down the green, twisting alleys of the Kennebunk,
Motionless in the meadows
The trees, the rocks, the cows. . .
And quiet dripped from the shadows
Like rain from heavy boughs.
The tree-toads started ringing
Their ceaseless silver bells;
A land-locked breeze came swinging
Its censer of earthy smells.
The river’s tiny cañon
Stretched into dusky lands;
Like a dark and silent companion
Evening held out her hands.
Hushed were the dawn’s bravados;
Loud noon was a silenced cry—
And quiet slipped from the shadows
As stars slip out of the sky. . .
It must have been an hour more, or later,
When, tramping homeward through the piney wood,
We felt the years fly back; the brotherhood
Of forests took us—and we saw the satyr!
There in a pool, up to his neck, he stood
And grinned to see us stare, incredulous—
Too startled to remember fear or flight.
Feeling the menace in the crafty night,
We turned to run—when lo, he called to us!
Using our very names he called. We drew
With creaking courage down the avenue
Of birches till we saw, with clearing sight,
(No longer through a tricky, pale-green light)
Familiar turns and shrubs, the friendly path,—
And Farmer Boothby in his woodland bath!
The woods became his background; every tree
Seemed part of him, and stood erect, and shared
The beauty of that gnarled serenity;
The quiet vigor of age that smiled and squared
Its shoulders against Time . . . And even night
Flowed in and out of him, as though content
With such a native element;
Happy to move about a spirit quite
As old, as placid and as confident . . .
Sideways we turned. Still glistening and unclad
He leaped up on the bank, light as a lad,
His body in the moonlight dripping stars. . .
We went on homeward, through the pasture-bars.
MARYLAND
BARBARA FRIETCHIE
John Greenleaf Whittier
***
Up from the meadows rich with corn,
Clear in the cool September morn,
The clustered spires of Frederick stand
Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.
Round about them orchards sweep,
Apple- and peach-tree fruited deep,
Fair as a garden of the Lord
To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,
On that pleasant morn of the early fall
When Lee marched over the mountain wall,—
Over the mountains winding down,
Horse and foot, into Frederick town.
Forty flags with their silver stars,
Forty flags with their crimson bars,
Flapped in the morning wind: the sun
Of noon looked down, and saw not one.
Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,
Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;
Bravest of all in Frederick town,
She took up the flag the men hauled down;
In her attic window the staff she set,
To show that one heart was loyal yet.
Up the street came the rebel tread,
Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.
Under his slouched hat left and right
He glanced: the old flag met his sight.
“Halt!”— the dust-brown ranks stood fast.
“Fire!”— out blazed the rifle-blast.
It shivered the window, pane and sash;
It rent the banner with seam and gash.
Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf;
She leaned far out on the window-sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will.
“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag,” she said.
A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came;
The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman’s deed and word:
“Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.
All day long through Frederick street
Sounded the tread of marching feet:
All day long that free flag tost
Over the heads of the rebel host.
Ever its torn folds rose and fell
On the loyal winds that loved it well;
And through the hill-gaps sunset light
Shone over it with a warm good-night.
Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er,
And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.
Honor to her! and let a tear
Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier.
Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave
Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!
Peace and order and beauty draw
Round thy symbol of light and law;
And ever the stars above look down
On thy stars below in Frederick town!
MICHIGAN
DRUM
By Philip Levine
***
In the early morning before the shop
opens, men standing out in the yard
on pine planks over the umber mud.
The oil drum, squat, brooding, brimmed
with metal scraps, three-armed crosses,
silver shavings whitened with milky oil,
drill bits bitten off. The light diamonds
last night's rain; inside a buzzer purrs.
The overhead door stammers upward
to reveal the scene of our day.
We sit
for lunch on crates before the open door.
Bobeck, the boss's nephew, squats to hug
the overflowing drum, gasps and lifts. Rain
comes down in sheets staining his gun-metal
covert suit. A stake truck sloshes off
as the sun returns through a low sky.
By four the office help has driven off. We
sweep, wash up, punch out, collect outside
for a final smoke. The great door crashes
down at last.
In the darkness the scents
of mint, apples, asters. In the darkness
this could be a Carthaginian outpost sent
to guard the waters of the West, those mounds
could be elephants at rest, the acrid half light
the haze of stars striking armor if stars were out.
On the galvanized tin roof the tunes of sudden rain.
The slow light of Friday morning in Michigan,
the one we waited for, shows seven hills
of scraped earth topped with crab grass,
weeds, a black oil drum empty, glistening
at the exact center of the modern world.
MISSISSIPPI
ON THE MISSISSIPPI
By Hamlin Garland
***
Through wild and tangled forests
The broad, unhasting river flows--
Spotted with rain-drops, gray with night;
Upon its curving breast there goes
A lonely steamboat's larboard light,
A blood-red star against the shadowy oaks;
Noiseless as a ghost, through greenish gleam
Of fire-flies, before the boat's wild scream--
A heron flaps away
Like silence taking flight.
MONTANA
ONCE IN THE 40S
By William Stafford
***
We were alone one night on a long
road in Montana. This was in winter, a big
night, far to the stars. We had hitched,
my wife and I, and left our ride at
a crossing to go on. Tired and cold--but
brave--we trudged along. This, we said,
was our life, watched over, allowed to go
where we wanted. We said we'd come back some time
when we got rich. We'd leave the others and find
a night like this, whatever we had to give,
and no matter how far, to be so happy again.
NEBRASKA
SHAKING IN THE GRASS
By Janice N. Harrington
***
Evening, and all my ghosts come back to me
like red banty hens to catalpa limbs
and chicken-wired hutches, clucking, clucking,
and falling, at last, into their head-under-wing sleep.
I think about the field of grass I lay in once,
between Omaha and Lincoln. It was summer, I think.
The air smelled green, and wands of windy green, a-sway,
a-sway, swayed over me. I lay on green sod
like a prairie snake letting the sun warm me.
What does a girl think about alone
in a field of grass, beneath a sky as bright
as an Easter dress, beneath a green wind?
Maybe I have not shaken the grass.
All is vanity.
Maybe I never rose from that green field.
All is vanity.
Maybe I did no more than swallow deep, deep breaths
and spill them out into story: all is vanity.
Maybe I listened to the wind sighing and shivered,
spinning, awhirl amidst the bluestem
and green lashes: O my beloved! O my beloved!
I lay in a field of grass once, and then went on.
Even the hollow my body made is gone.
NEVADA
DRIVING TO VEGAS
By Kirk Robertson
***
Tonopah's
the only place
contour lines
appear
to rise
between there
and Goldfield
the first
Joshua trees
beer at the Mozart Club
from then on
it's all downhill
between Mercury
and Indian Springs
the light
begins to change
you wonder
what you'll do
when you reach
the edge
of the map
out there
on the horizon
all that neon
beckoning you
in from the dark
NEW HAMPSHIRE
NATURAL CAUSES
By Mark Cox
***
Because my son saw the round hay bales--
1200 pounds apiece, shrink-wrapped in white plastic--
lining the fields,
we have had to search all evening
for marshmallows.
Two stores were out. Another
had one stale and shrunken bag.
The fourth had three bags, but no wood for fire,
so we went back to the first.
And I needed newspaper to start the kindling,
which is how I know Earl Softy died Monday,
at home, in his sleep, of natural causes. So rarely
we know how we know what we know.
Don't turn the page. Sit with us awhile,
here by the fire in New Hampshire.
Have a marshmallow.
Because my wife and I love each other
and wanted something of, and more than, ourselves;
because my little son has imagined heaven in the pasture land,
even death tastes sweet.
NEW YORK
COPPERHEADS
By E.M. Schorb
The New York Draft Riots
Vanish these walls, vanish this wealth, with visionary eyes that see
back to hot July 1863. Vanish where wealth shines shopping on Fifth
Avenue, five minutes from the lion-braced library, where I turn down
my book. Vanish these great, gray walls, to see when this mirage
was another, of a white-winged building housing motherless humanity.
Try to see out of the eyes of two hundred frightened black orphans
and their saviors, or, better, the eyes of one little girl under her bed,
who is to be beaten to sleep and burned alive. They come now, the
first,
malignant rumble of mobs is heard. A giant, bearing a huge American
flag,
appears. Ten thousand men and women follow. They shout: NO
DRAFT;
shout: KILL THE NIGGERS! One mob of ten thousand, among
many mobs,
one mad mob, is coming; Copperheads coming; but Mary doesn't
know
what they are. Snakes, she is told; and, people like snakes. Snakes?
What does it mean? But behind them the sky is red, as if the sun had
set in broad day, as if it had hit the earth and bounced back to the
sky
in cones of flame, like upward teeth, serrating the downward, hot blue.
The fireworks for the Fourth, a week before, had shaken her.
Looking everywhere, she saw no arms to hold her. BOOM BOOM!
Now again--BOOM BOOM! But this is wilder, worse. She caps her
ears,
her eyes rolling for a mother, while the giant bearing Old
Glory juts
his lantern jaw toward the white-winged building where she hides
terror
in tears, holding her braided, ribboned head as, between her ten-year-old
fingers, distorted clangor of malignant mob-voice penetrates with
curses and screams of coves and harpies, liquored-up looters, drink-mad,
blood-mouthed molls, ill-wind-shifted, now, toward Mary in the white-
winged
Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue, the ghost-building, inside tall
wealth, that I can reach in five minutes from this great, gray library,
close my book and walk out into the Fifth Avenue festival of limousines
and be inside of its smoldering, ectoplasmic doors with the orphan
children,
who are always poorest, with Mary, who hides under her bed, her eyes
spraying terror, shutting her ears to the Fourth of July or, now,
a week later, to the flag-bearing giant leading a mob through the present
affluent Fifth Avenue shoppers to BOOM BOOM KILL THE
NIGGERS
NO DRAFT KILL, outside the library window on Fifth Avenue,
inside of,
behind, through, the tremendous modern traffc stalled at red, frustrated,
Manhattan-honking. KILL! Mary sees feet, fast feet. She doesn't
understand that the children are being herded out to safety, to
Blackwell's Island on the East River. Mary sees feet
scurry by her bed, sees a watery world, like one submerged, when she
looks out. Then, above her bed, something huge and malignant appears,
something too big. An evil thing! She will not come out from under,
she will
not, as the white-winged building shakes like her body with battering
and the doors are pulled from their hinges. Mary tries to find her
mother
inside of herself, and finds an entrance and a dark hall. She goes in,
finds herself upright, her legs steady under her. She pats the bodice
of her pink dress, straightens her pink ribbon--for she knows her
mother
waits at the end of the dark hall--as the giant lifts her to the sky--
knows a door will open at the end of the dark hall--and dashes
her ten-
year-old body down, Great doors open, her mother shimmers with
beauty,
with long, strong, brown open arms. In fury at his loss, the giant howls
after the escaping orphans, and flames rise up around him as he moves,
touching, touching the pitiful beds of orphans, touching and torching,
his small mad head hissing, spitting curses upon Lincoln, the top-
hatted ape, and Greeley, and niggers, niggers, for his tongue would
fork
with curses if it could, as the white-winged asylum crumbles
in flames inside of the facades of now with its BEEP BEEP of
prosperity.
As if the great library walls had vanished, as if the market values
of now,
with their multi-millions of construction, were transparent, there
stands the Colored Orphan Asylum, and there inside is Mary, hiding
under
her bed. Mary and the flag-bearing giant. Mary and the mad mob.
I lean
back in my library chair and push up my glasses. I am trying to see
more
clearly. I think I don't understand any more than Mary did,
as the lion-braced library walls form around me again, shutting
me off
from my shopping, struggling fellow Americans on Fifth Avenue,
outside,
who cannot see the white-winged Colored Orphan Asylum as they
pass it.
But I know that all hurts must be outlived as humanity presses forward.
OHIO
BEYOND EVEN THIS
By Maggie Anderson
***
Who would have thought the afterlife would
look so much like Ohio? A small town place,
thickly settled among deciduous trees.
I lived for what seemed a very short time.
Several things did not work out.
Casually almost, I became another one
of the departed, but I had never imagined
the tunnel of hot wind that pulls
the newly dead into the dry Midwest
and plants us like corn. I am
not alone, but I am restless.
There is such sorrow in these geese
flying over, trying to find a place to land
in the miles and miles of parking lots
that once were soft wetlands. They seem
as puzzled as I am about where to be.
Often they glide, in what I guess is
a consultation with each other,
getting their bearings, as I do when
I stare out my window and count up
what I see. It's not much really:
one buckeye tree, three white frame houses,
one evergreen, five piles of yellow leaves.
This is not enough for any heaven I had
dreamed, but I am taking the long view.
There must be a backcountry of the beyond,
beyond even this and farther out,
past the dark smoky city on the shore
of Lake Erie, through the landlocked passages
to the Great Sweetwater Seas.
OKLAHOMA
CICADA
By John Blair
***
A youngest brother turns seventeen with a click as good as a roar,
finds the door and is gone.
You listen for that small sound, hear a memory.
The air-raid sirens howled of summer tornadoes, the sound
thrown back against the scattered thumbs
of grain silos and the open Oklahoma plains
like the warning wail of insects.
Repudiation is fast like a whirlwind.
Only children don't know that all you live is leaving.
Yes, the first knowledge that counts is that everything stops.
Even in the bible-belt, second comings are promises
you never really believed;
so you turn and walk into the embrace of the world
as you would to a woman, an arrant
an orphic movement as shocking as the subtle
animal pulse of a flower opening, palm up.
We are all so helpless.
I can look at my wife's full form now
and hope for children,
picture her figured by the weight of babies.
Only, it's still so much like trying to find something
once lost. My brother felt the fullness of his years, the pull
in the gut that's almost sickness. His white
smooth face is gone into living and fierce illusion,
a journey dissolute and as immutable
as the whining heat of summer.
Soon enough, too soon, momentum just isn't enough.
Our tragedy is to live in a world
that doesn't invite us back.
We slow, find ourselves sitting in a room that shifts so slightly
we can only imagine the difference.
I want to tell him to listen.
I want to tell him what it is to crave darkness,
to want to crawl headfirst into a dirt-warm womb
to sleep, to wait seventeen years,
to emerge again.
PENNSYLVANIA
RETURNING NATIVE
by John Updike
***
What can you say about Pennsylvania
in regard to New England except that
it is slightly less cold, and less rocky,
or rather that the rocks are different?
Redder, and gritty, and piled up here and there,
whether as glacial moraine or collapsed springhouse
is not easy to tell, so quickly
are human efforts bundled back into nature.
In fall, the trees turn yellower—
hard maple, hickory, and oak
give way to tulip poplar, black walnut,
and locust. The woods are overgrown
with wild-grape vines, and with greenbrier
spreading its low net of anxious small claws.
In warm November, the mulching forest floor
smells like a rotting animal.
A genial pulpiness, in short: the sky
is soft with haze and paper-gray
even as the sun shines, and the rain
falls soft on the shoulders of farmers
while the children keep on playing,
their heads of hair beaded like spider webs.
A deep-dyed blur softens the bleak cities
whose people palaver in prolonged vowels.
There is a secret here, some death-defying joke
the eyes, the knuckles, the bellies imply—
a suet of consolation fetched straight
from the slaughterhouse and hung out
for chickadees to peck in the lee of the spruce,
where the husks of sunflower seeds
and the peace-signs of bird feet crowd
the snow that barely masks the still-green grass.
I knew that secret once, and have forgotten.
The death-defying secret—it rises
toward me like a dog’s gaze, loving
but bewildered. When winter sits cold and black
on Boston’s granite hills, in Philly,
slumped between its two polluted rivers,
warmth’s shadow leans close to the wall
and gets the cement to deliver a kiss.
RHODE ISLAND
JERIMOTH HILL
By Tom Chandler
***
You will not recognize any bald knob of granite
or sheer cliff face silhouetted against clouds,
in fact, you won't realize you're anywhere at all
except by this bullet-riddled sign by the road
that curves through these scraggled third growth
woods that was once a grove of giant pines
that were cut down for masts that were used
to build ships to sail away to the rest of the world
from the docks of Providence Harbor, their holds
filled with wool from the sheep that grazed
in the field that had once been the giant pines
till the shepherds died off and the applers took over
and grew orchards of Cortlands and Macintosh
Delicious to fill the holds of the ships that sailed
to the rest of the world from the docks of Providence
Harbor with masts made from the giant pines till
the orchards moved west along with everything
else to less glacial land and the fields became
overgrowth of berries and hobblebush crisscrossed
by walls made of stones that had slept beneath
one inch of topsoil for twelve thousand years
till the settlers found when they tried to plant crops
that this was a country that grew only rocks which
they made into walls to pen in the sheep that provided
the wool that filled the holds of the ships that sailed
to the rest of the world from the docks of Providence Harbor.
SOUTH CAROLINA
SOUTH CAROLINA MORNING
by Yusef Komunyakaa
***
Her red dress & hat
tease the sky’s level-
headed blue. Outside
a country depot,
she could be a harlot
or saint on Sunday
morning. We know
Hopper could slant
light till it falls
on our faces. She waits
for a tall blues singer
whose twelve-string is
hours out of hock,
for a pullman porter
with a pigskin wallet
bulging with greenbacks,
who stepped out of Porgy
at intermission. This is
paradise made of pigment
& tissue, where apples
ripen into rage & lust.
In a quick glance,
beyond skincolor,
she’s his muse, his wife—
the same curves
to her stance, the same
breasts beneath summer cloth.
TENNESSEE
ANECDOTE OF THE JAR
By Wallace Stevens
***
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
TEXAS
HEART
By Catherine Bowman
***
Old fang-in-the-boot trick. Five-chambered
asp. Pit organ and puff adder. Can live
in any medium save ice. Charmed by the flute
or the first thunderstorm in spring, drowsy
heart stirs from the cistern, the hibernaculum,
the wintering den of stars. Smells like the cucumber
served chilled on chipped Blue Willow. Her garden
of clings, sugars, snaps, and strings. Her creamy breasts
we called pillows and her bird legs and fat fingers
covered with diamonds from the mines in Africa.
The smell of cucumber.... Her mystery roses....
Heading out Bandera to picnic and pick corn,
the light so expert that for miles
you can tell a turkey vulture
from a hawk by the quiver in the wing.
Born on April Fools’, died on Ground Hog’s,
he pulls over not to piss but to blow away
any diamondback unlucky enough to be
on the road between San Antonio and Cotulla.
Squinting from the back of the pickup
into chrome and sun and shotgun confection,
my five boy cousins who love me more
than all of Texas and drink my spit
from a bottle of Big Red on a regular basis
know what the bejeweled and the gun-loading
have long since forgotten. And that is:
Snakes don’t die. They just play dead. The heart
exposed to so many scrapes, bruises, burns,
and bites sheds its skin, sprouts wings and fl ies,
becomes the two-for-one sparkler on
the Fourth of July, becomes what’s slung between
azure and cornfield: the horizon.
UTAH
THE TWELVE UTAH CHRISTMASES (A PARODY)
***
On my first Utah Christmas, my true love gave to me
Popcorn popping on the apricot tree
On my second Utah Christmas, my true love gave to me
Two years on a mission
And the Smart family on my TV
On my third Utah Christmas, my true love gave to me
Three Degrees of Glory
Two years in Australia
And a First Amendment controver-sy
On my fourth Utah Christmas, my true love gave to me
4-A high school roundball
Three Sunday meetings
Two years in Korea
And that business with the SLOC
On my fifth Utah Christmas, my true love gave to me
FIVE-QUART ICE CREAMS
Four firing squads
Three scrapbooks
Two years in Peru
And a movie that's G or PG
On my sixth Utah Christmas, my true love gave to me
Six kids and counting
FIVE YEARS OF DROUGHT
Four quilting bees
Three meth labs
Two years in Japan
And a reservoir that's almost emp-ty
On my seventh Utah Christmas, my true love gave to me
Seven singing Osmonds
Six kids and counting
FIVE TOM GREEN WIVES
Forbidden love
Three spudnuts
Two years in Brazil
And a single poli-tickle par-ty
On my eighth Utah Christmas, my true love gave to me
Eight cups of Postum
Seven kids and counting
Six beehive hairdos
FIVE MONTHS OF SNOW
Forty private clubs (for members)
Three-two beer
Two years in Taiwan
And a salty lake that's really stink-y
On my ninth Utah Christmas, my true love gave to me
Nine percent minorities
Eight kids and counting
Seventies in Conference
Sixteen to start dating
FIVE FEET OF SLUSH (Oh my heck!)
Forgeries for sale
Three-piece suits
Two years in Ukraine
And a fiancée in Happy Vall-ey
On my tenth Utah Christmas, my true love gave to me
Ten bucks for parking
Nine kids and counting
Eight missing off-ramps
Seven guns per person
Six famous golfers
UTAH BY FIVE
Fourteen ski resorts
Three fault lines
Two years in Detroit
And a minivan or SUV (or both, plus a station wagon)
On my eleventh Utah Christmas, my true love gave to me
Eleven Mormon temples
Ten kids and counting
Nine NuSkin neighbors
Ate at Chuck-a-Rama
Theven thpecial thpiritth
Six Jell-o salads
FIVE ORRIN TERMS (Oh my Hatch!)
Forecast is cold
Three Eubanks (three?)
Two years in Tibet
And an uncompleted Lega-cy
(Highway)
On my twelfth Utah Christmas, my true love gave to me
Twelve-year-old deacons
Eleven kids and counting
Ten percent tithing
Nine zillion seagulls
Ate a bunch of crickets
Seven Peaks in Provo
Six hours to Vegas
FIVE PRO SPORTS TEAMS (if you count indoor football)
Four standard works
Three Nephites
Tooele ROCKS!
And a Robert Lund Christmas CD!
(Elves Gone Wild!)
VERMONT
IF YOU GET THERE BEFORE I DO
By Dick Allen
***
Air out the linens, unlatch the shutters on the eastern side,
and maybe find that deck of Bicycle cards
lost near the sofa. Or maybe walk around
and look out the back windows first.
I hear the view's magnificent: old silent pines
leading down to the lakeside, layer upon layer
of magnificent light. Should you be hungry,
I'm sorry but there's no Chinese takeout,
only a General Store. You passed it coming in,
but you probably didn't notice its one weary gas pump
along with all those Esso cans from decades ago.
If you're somewhat confused, think Vermont,
that state where people are folded into the mountains
like berries in batter. . . . What I'd like when I get there
is a few hundred years to sit around and concentrate
on one thing at a time. I'd start with radiators
and work my way up to Meister Eckhart,
or why do so few people turn their lives around, so many
take small steps into what they never do,
the first weeks, the first lessons,
until they choose something other,
beginning and beginning their lives,
so never knowing what it's like to risk
last minute failure. . . .I'd save blue for last. Klein blue,
or the blue of Crater Lake on an early June morning.
That would take decades. . . .Don't forget
to sway the fence gate back and forth a few times
just for its creaky sound. When you swing in the tire swing
make sure your socks are off. You've forgotten, I expect,
the feeling of feet brushing the tops of sunflowers:
In Vermont, I once met a ski bum on a summer break
who had followed the snows for seven years and planned
on at least seven more. We're here for the enjoyment of it, he said,
to salaam into joy. . . .I expect you'll find
Bibles scattered everywhere, or Talmuds, or Qur'ans,
as well as little snippets of gospel music, chants,
old Advent calendars with their paper doors still open.
You might pay them some heed. Don't be alarmed
when what's familiar starts fading, as gradually
you lose your bearings,
your body seems to turn opaque and then transparent,
until finally it's invisible--what old age rehearses us for
and vacations in the limbo of the Middle West.
Take it easy, take it slow. When you think I'm on my way,
the long middle passage done,
fill the pantry with cereal, curry, and blue and white boxes of macaroni, place the checkerboard set, or chess if you insist,
out on the flat-topped stump beneath the porch's shadow,
pour some lemonade into the tallest glass you can find in the cupboard,
then drum your fingers, practice lifting your eyebrows,
until you tell them all--the skeptics, the bigots, blind neighbors,
those damn-with-faint-praise critics on their hobbyhorses--
that I'm allowed,
and if there's a place for me that love has kept protected,
I'll be coming, I'll be coming too.
WASHINGTON
ROLL ON, COLUMBIA, ROLL ON
by Woody Guthrie
***
Roll on, Columbia, roll on
Roll on, Columbia, roll on
Your power is turning our darkness to dawn
So roll on, Columbia, roll on.
Green Douglas firs where the waters cut through
Down her wild mountains and canyons she flew
Canadian Northwest to the oceans so blue
Roll on Columbia, roll on
Other great rivers add power to you
Yakima, Snake, and the Klickitat, too
Sandy Willamette and Hood River too
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
Tom Jefferson’s vision would not let him rest
An empire he saw in the Pacific Northwest
Sent Lewis and Clark and they did the rest
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
It’s there on your banks that we fought many a fight
Sheridan’s boys in the blockhouse that night
They saw us in death but never in flight
So roll on Columbia, roll on
At Bonneville now there are ships in the locks
The waters have risen and cleared all the rocks
Shiploads of plenty will steam past the docks
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
And on up the river is Grand Coulee Dam
The mightiest thing ever built by a man
To run the great factories and water the land
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
These mighty men labored by day and by night
Matching their strength ‘gainst the river’s wild flight
Through rapids and falls, they won the hard fight.
Above: Woody Guthrie
image credit: npr.org
WISCONSIN
THE FOREST IS A PLACE WHERE WE ALL LIVE
by Stuart Stotts
***
Look down from an airplane, I'll tell you what you'll see.
From Madison to Menasha, Marinette to Menomonie
The great state of Wisconsin filled with trees.
The forest is a place for you and me
From the little bitty willow to the bur oak tree.
From the city to the country it will grow and give
The forest is the place where we all live.
It gives us boards and paper, it gives us shade and heat.
Makes oxygen for us to breathe and makes maple syrup sweet.
A place to climb and dream and swing our feet.
Home for hawks and badgers, home for deer and owls.
Hear woodpeckers tapping, and the black bear when it growls.
Listen as the distant wolf pack howls.
100 years before us, the pines had fallen fast.
Stumps decaying, wildfires raging through the piles of slash
We have learned some lessons from the past.
We'll plant trees where we need them and manage them with care.
Let the woods reseed itself, as it does everywhere.
A greener world for everyone to share.
Above: Poet Stuart Stotts
WEST VIRGINIA
WEST VIRGINIA
by Louise McNeill
***
Where the mountain river flows
And the rhododendron grows
Is the land of all the lands
That I touch with tender hands;
Loved and treasured, earth and star,
By my father’s father far–
Deep-earth, black-earth, of-the-lime
From the ancient oceans’ time.
Plow-land, fern-land, woodland, shade,
Grave-land where my kin are laid,
West Virginia’s hills to bless–
Leafy songs of wilderness;
Dear land, near land, here at home–
Where the rocks are honeycomb,
And the rhododendrons …..
Where the mountain river runs.
WYOMING
MORNING NEWS IN THE BIGHORN MOUNTAINS
by William Notter
***
The latest movie star is drunk in spite of rehab,
two or three cities had extraordinary killings
and expensive homes are sliding off the hills
or burning again. There's an energy crisis on,
and peace in the Middle East is close as ever.
In Wyoming, just below timberline,
meteors and lightning storms
keep us entertained at night. Last week,
a squirrel wrecked the mountain bluebirds' nest.
I swat handfuls of moths in the cabin
and set them out each day,
but the birds will not come back to feed.
It snowed last in June, four inches
the day before the solstice. But summer
is winding down -- the grass was frosted
this morning when we left the ranger station.
Yellow-bellied marmots are burrowing
under the outhouse vault, and ravens have left the ridges
to gorge on Mormon crickets in the meadows.
Flakes of obsidian and red flint
knapped from arrowheads hundreds of years ago
appear in the trails each day,
and the big fish fossil in the limestone cliff
dissolves a little more with every rain.
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