These poems are part of the special section, New Poems of U.S. History, reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence selected by editors Carolivia Herron, Summer Tate, and Robert Bettmann. You can read more about the section on the Day Eight website here.
Cherry Blossom Time, 1945
The planting of cherry trees in Washington DC originated in 1912 as a gift of friendship to the People of the United States from the People of Japan.
It’s late March, a time to see
the cherry blossoms peaking pink,
but briefly, already some beginning
to curl and fall on the National Mall.
In late March of 1945, Truman
may have seen them, with the battle
for Iwo Jima winding down, reports
hammering out over the teletype,
dark figures, numbers of casualties
on both sides, 22,000 Japanese dead,
24,000 Marines killed or wounded
on the beaches and along hillsides,
of a small island in the Pacific.
Out in
the sands south of Los Alamos,
preparations being made for the final test,
proving ground for an atomic bomb
to be released on August 6 over Hiroshima.
A city that people walking under those cherry trees
that spring couldn’t have pointed to on a map.
Almost unmapped by the blast, the war
over within a month. Late in the day,
toward evening, it’s hard not to see
those petals drifting down as though ash.
The True Flag
Little black stitches in a field of white.
I asked her what it was she was sewing.
“The true flag of America,” she said.
“Our Constitution and Bill of Rights.”
James Finnegan has published poems in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest,
The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, etc., as well as in the
anthologies: Good Poems: American Places edited by Garrison Keillor;
Laureates of Connecticut; Shadows of Unfinished Things; Waking Up to the
Earth; and Of Hartford in Many Lights. He posts aphoristic ars poetica on
the blog ursprache: https://ursprache.blogspot.com/
Featured image Sanzzu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
