My Country

My Country


America.
How can I answer?
I love the skin and rock and skies,
and the people of us, our ways,
our folkish madness.

I do not love our masters.
I do not love the word democracy
as it is used to hide from us the fearful
(in both senses) oligarchs who rule us.
I don't think it has much to do
with the United States.
It is the world, or the world now.

We are complicit in a vast nightmare
of enslavement, indifference, control.
Sony/BMG hurts the world
as much as Monsanto does-mind-control
by mass music, lifestyle compulsion
through image-manipulation
(Entertainment is the largest single industry
in America, and sculpts the world
more than the Pentagon has managed to do).

I do not like war, and think it is always evil.
We have lived for more than a century
with that evil.
Even the Civil War was evil-our bloodiest war yet,
and some other way had to be found.
And the War in Iraq is the vilest evil
we have yet contrived.
We sink, we sink lower-
and I say we only to the extent
that we tolerate (and god forgive some of us,
actually endorse) the vileness of our masters.
We know not what we do.

If some states seceded,
some states whose populations abstained
from war and mass imprisonment of minorities,
then those states could be the Re-United
States of righteousness,
and those I could love.

But for the moment,
I can only love America.
Which was before our politics.
And will be after.
America in eternity.
You know it too.
Every honest word is an act of contrition.
Every word is a pledge of allegiance.

Robert Kelly

Posted over on American Poetry Review