America

karla k. morton

January 5, 2021

It’s been whispered on the lips

of women forced and sold and beaten;

rallied lung-top

amid artillery fire in every war

we have ever known.

It’s a stone lady with a proffered torch;

the sand of the Gulf of Mexico,

the airport flooring my friend kissed

on his return from Eastern Europe.

We have been burned and blown and crushed.

We have been torn by limb

and intestine.

Yet still, we gather --

we gather today.

We hoist our children upon our shoulders,

Look child, look at all that is possible.

We are more than science, cells, and big bang;

more than political party –

we are one human standing beside another,

each put on this earth with a gift.

Let us trade onions for corn,

corn for bowls,

bowls for cotton,

cotton for steel,

steel for trucks,

trucks for schools,

schools for minds –

minds that know

to plant onions.

Look child,

whisper its name,

loose it from the peaks of the Sangre de Cristos.

What echoes back

is more than concrete,                     

more than industry,

more than art,

more than crops…

it is kindness.

You there, hoist that child upon your shoulders.

Look child,

look at all that could be.

Texas Poet Laureate karla k. morton's 14th poetry collection The National Parks: A Century of Grace has just been released by TCU Press (Dec. 2020). A percentage of royalties from morton and co-writer and fellow Texas Poet Laureate Alan Birkelbach will go back to the National Park System. Morton was, and is, in both politics and life, a hopeless poet of hope.