America the Beautiful: A Poem Sampler
Last week, I did a deep dive into poems that spoke to my complicated feelings about the state of our democracy. I came up with these eight and figured I’d share them. This small collection begins with Carl Sandburg’s 1970 poem, “The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany,” which builds off of President Lincoln’s message to Congress in 1862 to “disenthrall ourselves.” It ends with “Gate 4,” a wonderfully optimistic poem by Naomi Shihab Nye about an experience at the Albuquerque International Airport in New Mexico which affirmed her hope in humanity.
For me, poetry’s strength lies in its ability to shed a “sideways” light on the world, so the truth sneaks up on you.
“The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany” BY CARL SANDBURG (1970)
“Praise Song for the Day” BY ELIZABETH ALEXANDER (2009)
“Election Year” BY RICHARD BLANCO (2016)
“Ghazal: America the Beautiful” BY ALICIA OSTRIKER (2013)
“Frederick Douglass” BY ROBERT HAYDEN (1966)
“A House Called Tomorrow” BY ALBERTO RÍOS (2018)
“Of History and Hope” BY MILLER WILLIAMS (1997)
“Gate A-4″ BY NAOMI SHIBAB NYE (2008)
“The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany” (1970)
BY CARL SANDBURG
(We can succeed only by concert. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy
present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves. . . . December 1, 1862. The President’s Message to Congress.)
Be sad, be cool, be kind,
remembering those now dreamdust
hallowed in the ruts and gullies,
solemn bones under the smooth blue sea,
faces warblown in a falling rain.
Be a brother, if so can be,
to those beyond battle fatigue
Each in his own corner of earth
or forty fathoms undersea,
beyond all boom of guns,
beyond any bong of a great bell,
each with a bosom and number,
each with a pack of secrets,
each with a personal dream and doorway
and over them now the long endless windS
with the low healing song of time,
the hush and sleep murmur of time.
Make your wit a guard and cover.
Sing low, sing high, sing wide.
Let your laughter come free
remembering looking toward peace:
“We must disenthrall ourselves.”
Be a brother, if so can be,
to those thrown forward
for taking hardwon lines,
for holding hardwon points
and their reward so-so,
little they care to talk about,
their pay held in a mute calm,
highspot memories going unspoken,
what they did being past words,
what they took being hardwon.
Be sad, be kind, be cool.
Weep if you must
And weep open and shameless
before these altars.
There are wounds past words.
There are cripples less broken
than many who walk whole.
There are dead youths
with wrists of silence
who keep a vast music
under their shut lips
what they did being past words,
their dreams like their deaths
beyond any smooth and easy telling,
having given till no more to give.
There is dust alive
with dreams of The Republic,
with dreams of the Family of Man
flung wide on a shrinking globe
with old timetables,
old maps, old guide-posts
torn into shreds,
shot into tatters
burnt in a firewind,
lost in the shambles,
faded in rubble and ashes.
There is dust alive.
Out of a granite tomb,
Out of a bronze sarcophagus,
Loose from the stone and copper
Steps a whitesmoke ghost
Lifting an authoritative hand
In the name of dreams worth dying for,
In the name of men whose dust breathes
of those dreams so worth dying for,
what they did being past words,
beyond all smooth and easy telling.
Be sad, be kind, be cool,
remembering, under God, a dreamdust
hallowed in the ruts and gullies,
solemn bones under the smooth blue sea,
faces warblown in a falling rain.
Sing low, sing high, sing wide.
Make your wit a guard and cover.
Let your laughter come free
like a help and a brace of comfort.
The earth laughs, the sun laughs
over every wise harvest of man,
over man looking toward peace
by the light of the hard old teaching:
“We must disenthrall ourselves.”
Carl Sandburg was much more than just a poet when it came to Abraham Lincoln. The poem, “The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany,” was written by Sandburg as a lasting tribute to the president. He found his inspiration in one of Lincoln’s addresses to congress from December 1, 1862. The line “We must disenthrall ourselves” is featured in the Sandburg poem and can parallel two meanings – that of freeing the slaves, while freeing the nation from all old notions in order to create something new.
Image: Portrait by Robert Hill, created for cover of January 1953 Chicago Tribune Magazine of Books
“Praise Song for the Day” (2009)
BY ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration
Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.
All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.
Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.
We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.
I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,
picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.
Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?
Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,
praise song for walking forward in that light.
Elizabeth Alexander’s careful, precise poetry and her awareness of history, especially African American history, as well as her personal friendship with the Obamas, made her a natural choice as President Obama’s inaugural poet. Alexander became only the fourth poet ever asked to read at a presidential inauguration.
“Election Year” (2016)
BY RICHARD BLANCO
The last ghostly patch of snow slips away—
with it—winter’s peaceful abandon melts
into a memory, and you remember the mire
of muck just outside your kitchen window
is the garden you’ve struggled and promised
to keep. Jeans dyed black by years of dirt,
you step into the ache of your boots again,
clear dead spoils, trowel the soil for new life.
The sun shifts on the horizon, lights up
the dewed spider webs like chandeliers.
Clouds begin sailing in, cargoed with rain
loud enough to rouse the flowers into
a race for color: the rouged tulips clash
with the noble lilies flaunting their petals
at the brazen puffs of allium, the mauve
tongues of the iris gossip sweet-nothings
into the wind, trembling frail petunias.
Mornings over coffee, news of the world,
you catch the magic act of hummingbirds—
appearing, disappearing—the eye tricked
into seeing how the garden flowers thrive
in shared soil, drink from the same rainfall,
governed by one sun, yet grow divided
in their beds where they’ve laid for years.
In the ruts between bands of color, ragweed
poke their dastard heads, dandelions cough
their poison seeds, and thistles like daggers
draw their spiny leaves and take hold.
The garden loses ground, calls you to duty
again: with worn gloves molded by the toll
of your toil, and armed with sheers, you tear
into the weeds, snip head-bowed blooms,
prop their struggling stems. Butterfly wings
wink at you, hinting it’s all a ruse, as you rest
on your deck proud of your calloused palms
and pained knees, trusting all you’ve done
is true enough to keep the garden abloom.
But overnight, a vine you’ve never battled
creeps out of the dark furrows, scales
the long necks of the sunflowers, chokes
every black-eyed Susan, and coils around
the peonies, beheading them all. You snap
apart its greedy tendrils, cast your hands
back into the dirt, pull at its ruthless roots.
Still, it returns with equal fury and claim:
the red poppies scream, the blue asters
gasp for air, strangled in its vile clasp
that lives by killing everything it touches.
The sun’s eye closes behind mountains, but
you lose sleep tonight, uncertain if the garden
is meant to inevitably survive or die, or if
it matters—one way or the other—with or
without you. Maybe it’s not just the garden
you worry about, but something we call hope
pitted against despair, something we can only
speak of by speaking to ourselves about flowers,
weeds, and hummingbirds; spiders, vines, and
a garden tended under a constitution of stars
we must believe in, splayed across our sky.
Richard Blanco is the Education Ambassador of the Academy of American Poets. In his role, he helps champion the organization’s free resources for teachers, student projects, and other education initiatives. He is the author of several poetry collections, including How to Love a Country (Beacon Press, 2019). In 2013, Blanco was selected to read at Barack Obama’s second Presidential Inauguration. He lives in Bethel, Maine.
Image: Photograph by Karen Hugg
“Ghazal: America the Beautiful” (2013)
BY ALICIA OSTRIKER
Do you remember our earnestness our sincerity
in first grade when we learned to sing America
The Beautiful along with the Star-Spangled Banner
and say the Pledge of Allegiance to America
We put our hands over our first grade hearts
we felt proud to be citizens of America
I said One Nation Invisible until corrected
maybe I was right about America
School days school days dear old Golden Rule Days
when we learned how to behave in America
What to wear, how to smoke, how to despise our parents
who didn’t understand us or America
Only later learning the Banner and the Beautiful
live on opposite sides of the street in America
Only later discovering the Nation is divisible
by money by power by color by gender by sex America
We comprehend it now this land is two lands
one triumphant bully one still hopeful America
Imagining amber waves of grain blowing in the wind
purple mountains and no homeless in America
Sometimes I still put my hand tenderly on my heart
somehow or other still carried away by America
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937, Alicia Ostriker has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She currently serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Image: Photograph by Camille Lucarini, Fine Art America
“Frederick Douglass” (1966)
BY ROBERT HAYDEN
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
Robert Hayden’s poetry, which explored his concerns about race and African-American history, gained international recognition in the 1960s, and Hayden eventually became the first Black American to be appointed as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress.
Image: Mixed media portrait by Kenadi Johnson
“A House Called Tomorrow ” (2018)
BY ALBERTO RÍOS
You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—
You are a hundred wild centuries
And fifteen, bringing with you
In every breath and in every step
Everyone who has come before you,
All the yous that you have been,
The mothers of your mother,
The fathers of your father.
If someone in your family tree was trouble,
A hundred were not:
The bad do not win—not finally,
No matter how loud they are.
We simply would not be here
If that were so.
You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.
You are the breaking news of the century.
You are the good who has come forward
Through it all, even if so many days
Feel otherwise. But think:
When you as a child learned to speak,
It’s not that you didn’t know words—
It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,
And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.
From those centuries we human beings bring with us
The simple solutions and songs,
The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies
All in service to a simple idea:
That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,
Is ourselves. And that’s all we need
To start. That’s everything we require to keep going.
Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.
Be good, then better. Write books. Cure disease.
Make us proud. Make yourself proud.
And those who came before you? When you hear thunder,
Hear it as their applause.
Born in 1952, Alberto Ríos is the inaugural state poet laureate of Arizona and the author of many poetry collections, including A Small Story about the Sky (Copper Canyon Press, 2015). In 1981, he received the Walt Whitman Award for his collection Whispering to Fool the Wind (Sheep Meadow Press, 1982). He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2014 to 2020.
Image: John Lund, Getty Images
“Of History and Hope” (1997)
BY MILLER WILLIAMS
We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.
But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands—oh, rarely in a row—
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.
Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become—
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.
All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit—it isn’t there yet—
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.
In 1997, the award-winning poet, editor, and critic Miller Williams was honored as the country’s third inaugural poet, reading his poem “Of History and Hope” at the start of former President Bill Clinton’s second term.
Image: The ABC’s of Black History by Rio Cortez, Workman
“Gate A-4″ (2008)
BY NAOMI SHIBAB NYE
Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”
Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,”
said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”
I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
“Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let’s call him.”
We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.
And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradition.
Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.
Naomi Shihab Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. Nye’s poems and short stories have appeared in various journals and reviews throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East. Nye served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2010 to 2015, and is the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2019–21.
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