untitled - cliche America poem

Amy Schroeder
22 August, 2005
Critique Piece




When I was Three times Three refugees
from a country across the sea crowding in tents on my
        television screen, one named
A is for Alba is for Albania, everything was misunderstood
                 in my brain, I had never heard of Kosovo before that moment
I felt like that famous statue
standing guard over New
                  York Harbor: “Bring me your tired, your hungry, your poor”
my little red white and blue
heart felt the weight of the world
pulling me down like insurgent bombs
my patriotism probed action in me

What is America?
I woke up today with the impulse to watch
the sun bleed its morning
    light onto these purple mountain majesties, turn
the city-street smog into amber
fields of waving wheat sprung up between corporate towers, whose beacons
of blue neon I can see from my window
         And before the hustle and bustle of briefcases
before the newspaper presses covered in masquerade deceits
There was no war and no peace
Before the morning rush hour
America was Key’s America

When I turned sixteen there were
People burning flags in the streets and black spots on billboards
     I found a poster for Toyota to be public masturbation
    Images burning my mind I felt it melting in the hot reflection
of a shampoo advertisement
                   Little girls dressing in hip-huggers with midriffs tan and untouched
with no hips to fill the void, everyone is okay with promiscuous sex
the painted faces of youth have the war paint of the enemy
and never had I felt so cheated, so full of RAGE
Our founding fathers never anticipated
this misinterpretation of their dream

Every face is a mirror image of the other faces
every body is the same on the inside, right? I can see through
their skin to the Abercrombie Old Navy Nike South Beach tattoos
Buy America at WalMart, copyright
1776 or
1917 or
1991
It was all rewritten and rewritten and edited
arranged and reorganized by suits and ties
We’re so far beyond racism and sexism and ageism right?
Those black guys aren’t going to rape me
and those women won’t do a damn thing to stop it
because they’re too young to understand the politics of it all
We’ve taken free speech to the courts and made it into a problem
I’m so torn between this apoplexy and unconditional love for
this Land of the Free, where
freedom takes a lawsuit and a picket line
They can’t say that I haven’t lived through a war anymore
How dare they
assume I don’t understand what it means to be an
American

There’s a light at the end of this tunnel, for this complicated puzzle
missing pieces
there are a million voices starting a revolution
to change the state of the Union
the Land of the Free needs to stay the Home of the Brave
if we’re to become America the Beautiful