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Old Glory

POETRY

THINKING OF AMERICA

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.6K views

‘Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force.’

MAKING AMERICA WHITE AGAIN, Toni Morrison

 

Twenty five years ago – the year of the First

Gulf War, the launching of the World Wide Web,

the repeal of South Africa’s Apartheid Law,

and the ‘End of History’ – one August

Saturday in Godfrey, Illinois –

a town on the Mississippi bluffs –

I watched the wooden New England style

Church of Christ at Monticello cross the road,

on hydraulic jacks, to the Lewis & Clark

Community College campus. The crowd

was affable, and overwhelmingly white.

A marching band played ‘Tie a yellow ribbon’,

and Old Glory was in abundance.

To cheers the steeple bell was rung and rung.

 

The college had been the Monticello

Female Seminary, founded in

1835 by Captain Godfrey –

a retired fisherman from Cape Cod –

for whom the town was named. He believed,

‘When you educate a woman you

educate a family’. He admired

Thomas Jefferson – Founding Father,

president and conflicted slave owner –

so named the finishing school after

his primary Virginia plantation.

 

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark –

U.S. Army officer volunteers –

were commissioned by President Jefferson

to map the West, mind the French, impress the Sioux

and expand the concept of the thirteen states

beyond the confluence of the great rivers.

They set off from the banks of the nearby

Wood River and crossed the Mississippi

to sail up the Missouri to its source

two thousand miles away in the Rockies

across the lush and pristine Great Plains.

 

*

 

In the small town on the limestone bluffs

where bald eagles nest above the river

Adams, Washington, Franklin et al

would have felt at home that August day,

recognising most present as descendants –

collegial,  patriotic, Anglophone,

Protestant and white. Now, across the vast

darkling fields of the republic, they would hear

incessantly Jefferson’s prescient

‘…the knell of the Union…this act

of suicide…of treason against the hopes

of the world…a fire bell in the night…’

clanging, clanging, clanging.

 

 

 

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POETRY

LABOR DAY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

I  was invited to go power boating

on the Illinois River on Labor Day.

My elderly hosts were retired.

He had been a builder, she a teacher –

caring folk looking out for a stranger.

They had Scottish ancestry, they told me,

and confessed, laughing, that they had spent

the previous night imbibing Drambuie.

We spoke warmly of the water of life.

‘But no drinking on board!’ they chorused.

Old Glory hung limply in their yard

in the soupy Mid-West September air.

 

While the wife fixed lunch in the galley,

I stood next to the husband at the wheel

while the boat bucked and slapped and dodged.

‘We’d be goners if we hit the driftwood.’

The forests on either side were pristine,

he explained. ‘There were Indians here.’

 

‘Come and get it!‘ He steered towards the bank

and a moorage. He turned to me, speaking

softly. ‘Our youngest boy, Callum, died…

in Iraq last December. Just so you know.’

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE STREET PARTY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.7K views

Above every Mairie flaps the Tricolour.

On every lawn, in every yard through the gut

of America – where the Great Plains began

before the farmers came with wheat and pigs

and soya fields – Old Glory flutters.

Above the reception desk in every

riad in Morocco the king’s photo hangs.

Here, things are never that unambiguous.

 

In a street near the foot of the Downs,

too steep for tables, they have strung bunting

from house to house, moved cars, hired a leaning

bouncy castle and shared barbecues.

 

This chalk, grassland common – that slopes upwards

to the flint ridge with its Pilgrim’s Way,

from Winchester to Canterbury,

for a Norman priest killed by Norman lords –

is a (mostly) English floral lexicon:

Meadow Cranesbane, Meadow Vetchling, Yellow-rattle,

Dove’s Foot Cranesbill,  Common Spotted Orchid.

 

A Skylark ascends from the unmown grasses.

I think of Vaughan Williams’ orchestral piece,

with its shimmering solo violin,

the George Meredith poem which inspired it –

‘He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake’ –

Celts evoking the essence of what was theirs.

 

The party dwindles as the drizzle arrives.

To be English is to be contrarian –

not being Irish, Scots, Welsh or ‘foreign’.

At the top of the street, a patriot with

a large, St George’s Cross drooping above

the privet hedge, has lit a bonfire

in a garden incinerator.  The rain,

now heavy, drums on the lid and, though sodden –

being dressed in England football strip –

he forces wet, tabloid newspapers down

the narrow funnel. Acrid smoke wafts up.

 

 

 

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