A recent poem-of-the-day

[conuly]

A New National Anthem

By Ada Limón


The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always, there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps,
the truth is, every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?

Comments

[readerjane]

Oh darn. I was confused at first: I thought Ada Limón had written a new national anthem (which the link would lead me to) and the text was your reaction to it. But I figured it out.

[conuly]

Sorry!

[greghousesgf]

I can't write poetry that well but I can tell you why I have problems with the Star Spangled Banner.
1. It's too hard to sing, which makes sense in an odd way because the melody was taken from an 18th century British drinking song.
2. It glorifies war.
3. It refers to a battle during the War of 1812, which does not have a lot of relevance in US history today (unlike, say, the Civil War or the Revolutionary War)
4. The battle in question was not one of the more important battles in that war.
5. The US lost that battle.
frankly, I think the national anthem should be "This Land Is Your Land". Anybody can sing that melody, and it's about the natural beauty of the US, which any American should be proud of.

[chomiji]

I could go for that.

[shadowkat]

Completely agree with the poet. My preference has always been This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land...