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Max Siewert Poem
I sit here steeping in the History
of Our Land, a class, my eyelids dense.
Our Flag hangs in the corner of the class
Red and White folds in deluge, licking the
framed portrait of our Thomas Jefferson,
our founding father, the slave holder.
My teacher, stern at his pulpit, recites
to silent rows of desks and students,
to the classroom, he recites Our Constitution:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are...” my pen drops, my sight blacks
yet I can see through the stars and the stripes,
the desk legs tremble and I hear Ocean -
seeking depth in the sands of my inner beach
I can see true Lady Liberty
kneeling in the dirt. She’s draped in the dull
jade gown which she filched from the Iroquois,
Catawba, Choctaw, and Creek. The Natives
who shared their fish, corn, wisdom, and shelter
with the savages who would betray them
eventually, steal their hunting grounds,
burn their homes, rape their women and children.
I see why she stoops so low now, and how
her crown pines for the Nature that once was,
Nature that hides now in the oaks which had shed
their trunks and rotted into divinity.
So deep is my reverie that the scepter
held by Lady Liberty does not shine,
guide, shimmer, nor teach, but instead it falls -
falls in black ash clouds, falls like grime culled from the backs
of Germans, Italians, Chinese, from
the farmer who brought his family by ship
to polish the shoes of Christians who called
him yellow. Or the daughter, destitute,
and attending to men in brothels for coin.
Or the minister, told that he knew not
the word of God and would be spurned heaven.
They will never hold the scepter, and so
it falls like stinging sweat from the fissured
palms of Africans, Irishmen, and Jews.
There was the grandmother of eight who stole
what time she could from her master to teach
her son, daughter, and grandchildren how to read.
There, in a gutter, lived the lonely wife
who left home in wake of famine and still
had to bury her children in the mud
and abandon them to the Earth.
And there was the street-sweep who knew the burn
of cold spit on his forehead, kept his eyes
cast down to the dirt, still held onto hope.
Altogether, all together they were Americans.
Beckoned by Lady Liberty’s gilded staff
and enticed by her golden siren song
to the eastern coast of teeming land where
they first beheld its radiance, as if
only in a dream, then ceded life’s breath
to paint with Truth the lungs of Our Land
and the sickly veins of its governance.
I hear the collective voice of lives past:
the dying utterances of the slave,
the immigrant, the first woman to vote,
the soldier, the farmer, the criminal,
and the jailer, and they are one ocean,
and their voice is the persistent undulation
of the swelling-then-receding tide.
Their waters will cover her feet and lick
her shins until she falls like cornhusk,
Lady Liberty, Lady of Ideals
now empty, on her knees and in the sand.
And the men, women, and children will come
clad in white, blue, black, brown, red, and all
to form a circle of one,
one nation and one people gathered here
together to cast a single acorn
into the pit she left behind
and declare this Their Land.
My eyes open and so too do my ears
to a teacher sleepily sputtering at a lectern
spouting a message addressed to all,
addressed to none: “...we mutually pledge to each
other our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.”
Copyright © Max Siewert | Year Posted 2016
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