Ode to America, November 6, 2024
By Joanne Durham
Oh America, I desperately want
to praise you, but even this poem
has begun wrong, like you began
wrong. How easily you claimed
the name of two continents,
the lands of other peoples. Here
you are, states untied, no belt
of decency holding them together,
all the rot of unentitled claims
shredding your fraying fabric.
Lying in bed before dawn, I fight
that rot creeping through my lungs.
I do not want to suffocate,
least of all from my own faltering
breath. So I walk out onto the deck
of this ocean-facing place
I call home. The stars are still the same,
Orion’s belt shines on, so close
to the Equator everyone on earth
can see it. Some woman like me
will stand beneath it as the sun shadows
away from her, in China, Ghana,
Greece, and marvel
at the three giant stars that hold
this belt secure. In ancient myths
those heavenly bodies make a bridge
to the world of souls. Few of us know
their names, but we know connection,
perhaps that is all we need to know—
The fog thickens as the sun rises,
even the sky doesn’t want to witness
the mayhem below. We are left
to navigate by our own constellations,
what shines true in our fragile lives.
I walk down to the beach, search
for a shark tooth, a reminder
of how old this earth is, how much
it has weathered.
Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022) and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books 2023). Her poetry appears in Poetry South, Vox Populi, CALYX, NC Literary Review and numerous other journals and anthologies. She lives on the North Carolina coast, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. Visist her website at www.joannedurham.com.
Photo credit: Yuriy Totopin via a Creative Commons license.
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