Ostriker: Still Carried Away by America

Norman Rockwell, Pledge of Allegiance

Monday

Here’s an Alicia Ostriker poem that speaks very much to our current times, even though it was written in 2013. We don’t need Donald Trump to reveal our divisions, however. We’ve always had a dark side and a light side.

In Ostriker’s version, the two are characterized by the difference between “The Star Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful.” The first, which started off as a martial drinking song, celebrates how the flag keeps flying despite “bombs bursting in air.” The other is a hymn to the country’s natural beauty. One has its fists up, the other its arms outstretched.

According to Wikipedia, the ghazal—a Middle Eastern form—is comprised of five to fifteen independent couplets that are somehow linked, in this case by the repetition of the word “America.” I find my own heart thrilling as I hear my country named in what functions as a one-word refrain. “School Days,” meanwhile, takes me back to a song I learned in first grade (in 1957), when we were “still hopeful.”

Ghazal: America the Beautiful

Do you remember our earnestness our sincerity
in first grade when we learned to sing America

The Beautiful along with the Star-Spangled Banner
and say the Pledge of Allegiance to America

We put our hands over our first grade hearts
we felt proud to be citizens of America

I said One Nation Invisible until corrected
maybe I was right about America

School days school days dear old Golden Rule Days
when we learned how to behave in America

What to wear, how to smoke, how to despise our parents
who didn’t understand us or America

Only later learning the Banner and the Beautiful
live on opposite sides of the street in America

Only later discovering the Nation is divisible
by money by power by color by gender by sex America

We comprehend it now this land is two lands
one triumphant bully one still hopeful America

Imagining amber waves of grain blowing in the wind
purple mountains and no homeless in America

Sometimes I still put my hand tenderly on my heart
somehow or other still carried away by America

I still feel carried away when I say the “Pledge of Allegiance” and imagine an indivisible America.  Such civic rituals have never been so important.

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