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“Ghazal: America The Beautiful” by Alicia Ostriker

By Luke Stromberg • July 4, 2018 • E-Verse Universe

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

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and the Beautiful

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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

 

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is a major American poet and critic. She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including, most recently, Waiting for the Light; The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog; The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979–2011; and The Book of Seventy, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She has received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award, among other honors. Ostriker teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Drew University and is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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"Ghazal: America The Beautiful"4th of JulyAlicia OstrikerIndependence DayJuly 4thpoempoemspoetpoetrypoets
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"The Body was Dragged Some Distance Before it was Abandoned" and Others by Ernest Hilbert in Journal of American Poetry

1 Comment

  • ronhouchin.99@gmail.com'
    Reply Ron Houchin July 4, 2018 at 10:59 am

    Most of the politically oriented poetry I read only half succeeds. It succeeds as social/political commentary but fails as a poetic experience. This poems does both successfully, I think.

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About the Author

Luke Stromberg

Luke Stromberg is the Associate Poetry Editor of E-Verse. His work has appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review, Think Journal, and several other venues.

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