Poets to Come
after Walt Whitman
America, I cannot tell your story.
No voice sings broad within to justify you.
I look for your beauty in my early memory and find only dollhouses,
broken piano keys, tea sets from another Paris.
America, I just don’t have the tools.
You wear me down with your pander, your holler and your sprint.
You run, you tweet, you talk, you shout into the wild.
You gaze into the mirror when your mirrors should be covered.
America, you are a continent of sledgehammers driving spikes through
railroad ties, of pneumatic nail guns percussing rooftops.
You are a continent that carved kitchens out of rock.
Most adolescent empire, Arouse! and see your value on this earth.
You have brothers and sisters to the north and to the south—
Brothers and sisters and more reaching out across the Pacific, the Atlantic,
across the water, across a desert.
Open your entrepreneurial hands!