The Man from Laramie
When, in my youth, I learned about America sitting in my London classroom, I heard the teacher refer to certain names that seemed to roll off her tongue: Chippewa and Idaho, Connecticut and Maine, California, Arkansas, Georgia and Seattle, Wisconsin, Savannah, Corpus Christi, Dallas and Chicago. Great states and awesome cities. I remember the first movie I ever saw: ‘The Man From Laramie.’
Then there were the rivers: Mississippi, Allegheny, and the River Platt, not to mention the lakes like Erie, Huron, and Mead, or the waters that somersaulted over Niagara. I learned about American tribes: Chattahoochee, Arapaho, Navajo, Crow, Comanche, Chickasaw, Chapolapec, Sioux.
What about the places whose names derived from saints: San Angelo and San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Saint Pete? Or the resting places within the United States that always provoked a conversation and even today, touch the heart: Cathedral Gorge in Utah, California’s Capistrano, The Poconos, Tuckahoe, and Tonawanda.
I learned how settlers brought place names out of the old world: Little Italy, Chinatown, New Orleans, Paris, Birmingham, and New England.
Poets must help protect a country’s language and beauty.
America immensely inspired me in my youth. Nothing has changed. I cannot believe the love and luck of living here, observing and conserving what is essential to a nation.
What a beauty this country is: stand long enough and watch a rocket fire into space, watch skies all over the country turn to wine, pick up a novel ‘Look Homeward Angel’ written by Thomas Wole, a giant of literature, walking around, picking up everything, sniffing, a great hound searching out stories. Maybe our country has never had a Mozart: you can’t make that kind of music in baseball gloves.
We can’t change times past, but we can change the future: the protector of democracy is under our control.
This is America: There’s always somebody whistling courage down the corridor, but when you open the door against adversity, democracy is standing there.
We are America, we, the people.
I was never loved more or made more whole by another nation the way America has loved and made me whole.
There is nothing quite like the beauty of America. It has its faults, but what thing of real beauty has not?
