These poems are part of the special section, “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.
Ink and Quill Dream
Nineteen feet tall,
dressed in regal bronze,
Thomas Jefferson stands
in a white marble dome,
encircled by the words
that made his life so large.
We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . .
Crowds gather beneath him
pondering the giant letters
carved in the curving walls.
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
He was a poor public speaker
who died in debt.
And we can’t reconcile
how a man who lauded freedom
enslaved others in his time.
Yet his ink and quill
gave us a dream
to sculpt our nation
as we chip and chisel
the elusive face
of democracy.
Unafraid
When you love with all your heart,
a fractured skull will not deter you.
You will continue to walk, facing
forward, the way John Lewis did
across the Edmund Pettus Bridge,
Selma, Alabama, 1965.
When you believe America
can live up to its promise,
you’re not afraid to make noise
or get in “good trouble.”
And when in spite of
beatings, arrests, and setbacks
you live to be eighty, long enough
to see statues torn down
and buildings renamed,
you know you were right
to put your faith in the future,
marching forward, unafraid.
An Alternative Crop
We pair him with peanuts—
hundreds of products
George Washington Carver
cultivated to save southern soil.
He charmed Congress,
addressed auditoriums,
and attracted attention
from a segregated public
pairing a Black man
and science
for the first time.
Like the peanuts he promoted,
Carver offered an alternative crop,
rich with nutrients,
for a land exhausted by cotton,
civil war, and slavery.
Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Visit her at www.jacquelinejules.com
Featured image King of Hearts, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
