Ode to Americaby Harvey Havel
I.I see you once again, my life long friend.
Sated am I with your towering art
Your fertile gold plains and kin I must part
To forget about our troubles that offered no end.
When suddenly I came upon my best plans to leave
And had planned my escape, knowing full well
To an antique land I’d go, and there I would dwell
Pink clay ovens and ancient banyan trees.
The women in silk, their temples nearby
Other-worldly creatures, numb before altars
Believers who knelt and wept for their martyrs
The smog lead-thick, browning out white sky.
The chaotic thoroughfares of gaunt brown men
Burlap sacks on their heads and weaving through crowds
The stick-figured women squatting square on ground
Selling fragrant pomegranates, their chatter too foreign.
Their fruit stalked by flies, chewing next on the flesh
Of the naked corpse distended, the torments that shook her
Her eyes open-wide, her lips a sterile blue
Her head bruised and bloodied and a child at her chest.
II.And was I so naïve to leave you, America,
With your swinging moods and unsolvable paradoxes,
Profits to protect, and your crippling detoxes,
Your grandest of achievements, a grief-stricken miasma?
But you must win at all costs
Even while beating yourselves
The bells that now toll and raging death knells
Rain the women and children and those you’ve lost.
And was I so arrogant to think,
With my criticism and anger,
The hot blood you withstood from this foul-mouthed stranger
Could change you and all with a magical wink?
My young mind rising much too quickly
Ripped from the mother who wept as she fed me
A Bible you shoved in, a text by Deuteronomy,
Eclipsing the Arabic and the prophet’s war-wizardry.
So I sucked in your chemical ablutions
And in that battle we both did learn
Through the stinging-thin needles and the electrode burns
That the blood you watered-down carried very few solutions.
And while wandering broke and penniless in your cities,
In the asylums where you then stored me,
Confronting ourselves in white rooms so ordinary,
Your ghosts in white uniform, their severity and pity.
And not thinking this well-enough through,
I sent my hate and anger through venomous fangs
Naively supported by violent street gangs
Hurling Molotov cocktails of yellow-orange hue.
Through bourgeois storefronts that illumined the faces
Of the brown-shirts that gathered and ripped out the throats
Of innocent shopkeepers who called my daydreams a hoax
Until my bare-knuckled hands relieved my good graces
By spraying sharp bullets into wandering crowds
Ridiculing the hypocrisy of your honor and justice
My stratagems upending, horrific, and tumultuous,
Severing blonde heads and then throwing them into mounds.
Such visions riddled me, my energies drained,
My conscience full depleted
My fires belched, and my nausea near-completed
Stomped on your good name and towards your vulnerabilities I aimed.
You merely fought back with your humane kindness
And a love that drives true dictators mad
Delivering me from the hell of the life I once had
Restoring my good name, by diluting insanity with mindlessness.
And you fed me sweet meats,
Your vegetables and potatoes,
Let me sow on your soil where the golden grain grows,
And won over my army now in full retreat
By teaching me eternal language
To ponder strong realities
Taking good care of my barest necessities,
My blunt anger subdued by philosophy and adage.
III.But still I demanded more, as if somehow I deserved it,
Your stately-white mansions and your well-manicured lawns,
The respect that came without earning anything at all,
And your warm-blooded women and the graces they permit.
But you disallowed it, and so from there I did roam
To find bountiful women who loved me without reason,
My incongruent body molding to their treasons,
When you disallowed that after their shudders and moans.
Yet I cried for many more to cure the scars in my head,
My return to the womb met with fierce resistance,
Where they built stone fortresses to ward off my nuisance,
As I yearned to have each one of them alone in my bed.
They then cast spells to protect their sacred gardens,
Expelled me from the paradise that was their lot
Taught me the value of what I should and should not
As I haunted their irrationale with my stupidity and my nonsense.
My selfishness soon exhausted, and there I made amends,
The visages that I touched burned well into my brain,
Never to be cured through the wettest of rains,
As I can finally see how beautiful they’re made.
IV.But to the machine they did feed me
And ran me through grinders
The cogs of work hours doing away with my remainders
Instilling sublime art and then imprisoning criminality.
And for this, America, you charged me nothing,
Not a penny, not an ounce,
As your bells that chimed high soon graciously announced
That the criminal was gone and had vanished with my flings,
And the cancer at my lungs, arrested by correctness,
My fat belly slimming to quell the ache of my body,
You showed me good health, not a moment too tardy
My fate suddenly lying miles away from distress.
My sanity restored, my mind working again,
Along with most of my guts and my shattered parts
My weak speech transmuted into tender art
And the doggerel cured by the angels you sent.
So the speed-trap on the freeway bothers me no more,
You saved a sorry, bitter soul from an early death,
My talk once so bellicose mattering much less,
And the hard work that fulfills me I do without chore.
You understood me completely,
Leading me out of the ghettoes
Where vultures hovered and the black crows flew,
Their sharp beaks picking at carrion so neatly.
You bade me drink from your clear rivers,
And found my family work,
Put up with my anxieties, idiosyncrasies, and quirks,
My heart opening up to those I thought killers.
And the black man was there
Nurturing me back to happiness,
The confused and mottled mess,
A breeze in the air.
And no, America, I never deserved this,
Your radiance too bright,
That forged harsh darkness into enduring light,
After such turbulent disturbance.
Yet tempers still flare over terror and oil,
The prices too high, the taxes too low,
The deserts damp with scorching hot blood,
And these children you raise fatigued with toil.
The wise men said that ignorance is bliss,
Not a war of ideas, punditry, and mayhem,
Hezbollah leaders vowing borderless revenge,
The news stories still providing all this.
But never in my life have I been so proud
Of this country of mine – right or wrong.
I fall to my knees and sing her great songs
Dancing in the ecstasy that will send our people home.
Because never have I been guided so completely,
Though still more battles and paradoxes to come,
Those grey lines and doubts yet to out-run,
Because I’ve finally found a country that tolerates me.
And I have been saved by America
From my own murderous hands,
And with thee do I dance in a Technicolor band,
With brilliant fireworks drifting over our proud home,
Over synagogue and mosque until peace finds her throne.
© Harvey Havel (2006)
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