when i was ordained a journalist,
a halfwit wisdom-speller with i's too often after e's,
they mounted a valediction for me:

"goodbye, you crucible of culture and the end," they pomped.
"we wish you joy on your carpetbagging beats,
the inciting sins you write your things about—

"the ways in which we fall.
and glory to you, the one who settles truth
by shivering quotes in darkness

and flickering candles in caves.
for what would be the world without you?"

a better place, I'm told; a feast of fiends without wits.
and likely more bourbon
to go around.

It is fair to wonder what your name
was all about—

before it was attached to you.

The crisp sounds that round together in a
full-breath definition of head-to-soul-to-foot.

Surely, the world could not have been so rich before.

Say your name again and again and again
and with each refrain, remember who you are:

The mad morning hair and queer-as-you-breathe
sun-starter who rolls with little logic from the shower

to a dreamer-doctor-writer-lawyer-teacher-self.
A dawn of aspiration and a mother-father, too,

perhaps. A twinkle that inspires when you are
unaware, and friendly face that counts the happy

paces of so many years with friends of every bond.
An iconoclastic icon, no equal in the name.

Now turn your thoughts around as you paddle
through your days. For as star-lit as you are—

—principal among the constellations—

every soul you see today
is just as brilliant in their name.

There is war across the stream, I’ve read.
And corruption over the wall.

There is a dire need I’ve seen to feed
the hungry over there—

Perhaps we’ll find it, we Nation, within our purses
to bargain with such backwardness.

To push the inside-out-ness across the pond
and over the bridge to other places

where such sin belongs.

I voted for the men and women who
raked the evils to tomorrow and over there;

to the places that—beer in hand and
TV crackling—I cannot say I know very well (at all).

To the places so foreign even our shared humanity is
no more real than Landlord Mercy.

Still—something moans inside my conscience
like the grazing hum of locusts.

Even I know there are so many walls, so many streams,
so many lands to skip and souls to sour before

the round world brings the desperate
back to me.

“yes, you can”
they say to we, the writers,

when we are clung to writing desks
and textbook conversations as school naughts—

boys and girls who churn with knowledge in a mad pitch for
the matter of the American dream.

And through it all, this sneaks between the lines:
That dreams and matters and states are smithed by words—

Words that mold the landscape
That plough the fields
That pave the streets
That breach the wild for mankind to explore.

Do you remember the lessons?

I still remember the wheelbarrow, glazed
with rainwater, beside the white chickens…

And I still search for the farmer who
brought them together, whose footsteps cured

the chronicle of white and black,
the chapters of women and men,
the tables of hungry and over-fed,
the acts of untold races and the mix of tribes—

the history of we.

“It is writing on which we walk,” our forebears croon—

“but be prepared not to earn enough
to buy a scrappy pair of shoes.”