Blank Verse Essay on the Haunting of America
#52 of poetry
Put this together from a bunch of other points I had. It's surprising how smooth blank verse essay, as a form, makes doing that.
I don't really know what more I could add here. It's not much of an essay if it isn't self-explanatory.
If you tell stories long enough my friend,
I think, if you are honest, you must own
That stories told here, told about here, try
To turn into ghost stories. Only by
Supreme and rigid force of will can you
Tell any story in this land of ours
And not discover, if you let it last,
A ghost or two within it, before long.
I do not mean, of course, merely the most
And obvious ghost stories. For indeed,
America has more than its fair share
Of phantom hitchhikers, of wailing shades,
Of unglimpsed hands of children neath the bridge,
The hook left dangling from the hot rod door.
The raw head and bloody bones, that howl
Somewhere out in the forest wilderness.
The creature at the bottom of the bed
Accusing you about its missing tail.
The riders in the storm torn-desert sky.
The spectres at the crossroads. The lovelorn
And pining rapping at the chamber door
Which, opened flung, reveals nobody there:
Just wind among the trees, just blackbirds on
The lintel, just the anchors on our wrists.
But any honest soul must also ask:
How many bones are our houses built on?
The huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.
Some dead of hunger, some of overwork
Wearied of life, and weary still in death.
The worker and the slave, the refugee,
Those turned away from begging at the door.
The soldiers killed in every useless war
And those they killed in uselessness as well.
Our safety laws are written in the blood
Of those they were not written yet to save.
My people, of the many colored flame,
Have all the liberties that we have found
(Which yet are not so many) at the end
Of death march down the long brick-quilted road.
And underneath, how many hundred years
Of peoples, of whom many have not heard
On stolen land. Which aye, is all of it.
You cannot live a day, nay not an hour,
On land they claim was made for you and me
With having to wade across a flood
Of business, all unfinished, left by some
Old, pale, rich, heedless heir who, if he lived,
Would never stoop to speak to one of us.
The consequences of their lives unkempt,
The fallout of their choices unresolved.
Each day, you lay your hand on something that
Is both the remnant of somebody's life,
And could not come to be without their death.
Look close, with honest eyes, and you will see
The ghosts in whatsoever story's told.
We all are living in a ghost story.
Your house is haunted, and has always been.
And even as the universe runs down,
The stars burn out, and heat and time themselves
Grind to a halt. With humankind long dead
So that concepts of 'Marriage,' 'September,'
and 'Five' mean nothing: no one, now, is there
To whom they could mean aught. Still nonetheless
It will forevermore remain the truth:
September fifth was once my wedding day,
Not time nor omnipotence can undo
In Saecula Saeculorum, Amen.
The universe is meaningless until
We break its silence. Whatever we shout,
The echoes of it spread forevermore
Our stories like the ripples in a pond.
...and what else is a soul, if tis not that?
And what else is a ghost? And aye what else
Is immortality? My story too
Will someday be a ghost story, and I
The ghost that tells it. You that read these lines
Know this: Et in Arcadia Eris.
You feel the chill, a-creeping down your spine?
This house is haunted, and the ghost is mine.