American Ball

Chris Ellery

October 19, 2020

ballot (n.) 1540s, “small ball used in voting,” also “secret vote taken by ballots,” from Italian pallotte, diminutive of palla “ball,” for small balls used as counters in secret voting, from a Germanic source, from PIE root *bhel- (2) “to blow, swell.” Online Etymology Dictionary 

On the classroom wall while music played

a little ball bounced atop the syllables of 

“The Star-Spangled Banner.” As we learned to read

we sang the daily lesson America Is Best, 

brave and free, and we were on that team. 

Later on we played the game called Duck and Cover,

rolling like pill bugs underneath our desks. 

We didn’t vote for that. We did not elect the wind 

that stripped the trees, knocked houses flat,

and blew into our brains a hurricane of fire. 

That bouncing ball grew up to be a bullet, dropping 

out of school and ricocheting through the news 

end over end. My Lai. Kent State.

Kennedy and King. Still we sang and rode 

the glaring rocket to the moon.

Once old enough, we filled the little bubble in 

ourselves, keeping carefully inside the lines 

to draw a bullet hole beside the name of one 

we hoped might lift our shredded banner up. 

We got Watergate instead. 

And so we came to our majority in a fall from grace.

We knew slave labor built our house.

We knew our cavalry massacred the Ghost Dance 

at Wounded Knee to make the suburbs safe.

We knew the robber barons really called the shots. 

Still, through all our disillusionment, we blacked 

the bullet in, we hung the chad, we touched 

with fingertips the tab that says in capitals: SUBMIT.

Thus we elected from among ourselves captains 

all too like ourselves to sail our ship of state.

We’re tired. The revolution is too slow to come. 

Now in the vortex of unceasing war, one man’s 

tiny hands grope the Republic like a deflated ball.

No wonder our children take a knee.

What can we the people do? 

The letters of 

the anthem of America are grief and rage 

and hope, cut from the ballots of two centuries. 

So against the blast of yet another November wind 

we must summon the founding faith in human light

and cast our little pebbles on the heap. 

Chris Ellery is author of five poetry collections, most recently Canticles of the Body and Elder Tree. He has received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dora and Alexander Raynes Prize for Poetry, and the Betsy Colquitt Award. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Ellery teaches literature, creative writing, and film criticism at Angelo State University.