Bad Americans

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.

— Robert Frost

Gerard Van der Leun1692 Mangrove AveApt: 379Chico, CA 95926Email: vanderleun@gmail.com

 

Bright blooms of flame spattered shadows on that tide
Whose strangling fingers clawed into our lands,
And scraped out slots, fresh graves upon our sands.

A far-off signal flared and sputtering fell,
Its bloom of sparks erupting deep in slate,
But, like our last edition, this signal came too late.

The drumming bursts of broken cannons
Stomped along the edges of our gilded cage,
And faded like the lies we smeared on our front page,

Faded until all we heard of want or wish or war
Were the screams of our grandchildren slain
Beyond our gilded sand, upon our once fruited plain.

— Van der Leun

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman

April is over. May moon.
How many more for my regard,
                             hundreds, a handful?
Better not trouble the dark water due north of north.
Better to concentrate on something close, something small.
This stick, for instance. This word.

–Charles Wright

Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”