Thursday, July 4, 2024
Independence Day in the United States of America
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
This land is my land, your bones are my bones
Diana Butler Bass tracked down three poems which regard the 4th of July with different eyes. “Which one speaks to you most deeply?” she asked, after sharing one of her favorite paintings, “The Avenue in the Rain.”
Last night, looking through the old writings I keep around for no reason except nostalgia, I found an envelope of letters to the Courier, Lincoln’s daily paper, where I worked for a summer and earned the right to be heard after I spent a week in 1968 at the Democratic National Convention, soon to be held in Chicago again after all these many years.
Those letters I wrote 56 years ago, brimmed with anger about unfairness and hypocrisy and entitlement, all of which seemed so wrong in the land of the free. Later I chose to major in history at Valpo, and my perspective changed as I realized democracy and freedom had always been fragile and incomplete.
Here’s the poem I chose from the three Diana offered. “A New National Anthem” was written a few years ago by Ada Limon, current US Poet Laureate, the first Latina to hold this honor. If you read it via the link above, you’ll also find a picture of Francis Scott Key’s original manuscript of “The Star Spangled Banner,” which includes three verses that many of us have not learned by heart …
The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets’
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps
the truth is that every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we absent-mindedly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the shortgrass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?
It would have done me good to add a sentiment like Ada’s to my letters (“Don’t get me wrong, I do like the flag …”). Because I do, even when worn as clothing. The bright red, white and blue on the new Pepsi can also catches my attention, no doubt because I start feeling the flag, and the sentiments it wrings out of me, right there in my hand.
Looking over this last paragraph, I realize how difficult it is for me to write about patriotism and democracy and the everlasting light in the American window. See, there I go again. So I’ll stop this, and be grateful for God and her arms around us.
Although, as Annie Dillard said for herself and for me in her masterpiece, For the Time Being, “I don’t know beans about God.”
(Amos 7, Psalm 19, 2 Corinthians 5, Matthew 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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