This poem is 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.

(for my grandfather, Sigmund Rottenberg, 1910-1994)

You left me only those coordinates, but how easily
I can conjure it: quick search reveals the two stories
of flowered geometry, steel Deco scrollwork
long and tightly curled as payes on either side

of the fragile glass doors to survival you entered
for four years. You would’ve seen the German
Gothic font—pale, familiar, menacing—bricked
two floors tall into the side of the 20-story building

announcing the address. You would’ve seen stone
fox heads like gargoyles mounted on the façade
celebrating the debased deities of this palace,
reminders of how people crave stolen softness,

how they sell exploitation as luxury—anything
to stay warm. This place was a vision, the dream
of Bernstein, a Pole a generation ahead who took
his 30-year head start and built this temple

for accented men like your boss Horowitz to sell in,
a fur blanket for mute newbies like you to hold onto.
Bernstein once started just like you: slicing skins
of foxes, minks, sables, rabbits; snipping paws,

heads, and tails from silken, lifeless pelts to erase
any truth from this pilfered velvet; planning ribbons
of fur he would carve, match, piece with his hours
similarly shorn of his underpaid sweat, made beautiful

for someone else’s showroom. You would have had to
stand to best wield the furrier’s knife, your Nazi-ruined leg
throbbing by the end of each day. How many animals,
how many men does it take to make just one coat of gold?

It didn’t matter that you were a Horowitz in Berlin.
Your life now depended on every strict incision, every slit
you scored to make Horowitz richer, so Horowitz could
make Bernstein richer. Welcome to America, they smile.

Featured image Samuel Herman Gottscho, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

The Birth of Oratory

“One day in 1830…[Douglass] purchased a secondhand copy of the book he would later call his ‘rich treasure’ and his ‘noble acquisition.’ From that day forward in his life as a slave, The Columbian Orator became his constant companion…The Columbian Orator went through twenty-three editions…over the more than sixty years it remained in print…It was the creation of a man…determined to…instill in young people the heritage of the American Revolution.”
—David W. Blight

Eloquence can flourish only in the soil of liberty.
Frederick Douglass at age 13 bought his first book,
bought for fifty cents his first and only personal possession,
enabling him to give tongue to thoughts

that added much to my limited stock of language,
an eloquence to flourish in the soil of imagined liberty,
thoughts that previously flashed through my soul, and died.
Bought for fifty cents, his only personal possession,

redolent of the principles of liberty, the school book
added utterance to his limited stock of language
and poured floods of light into his aching mouth,
thoughts of emancipation that previously flashed through his soul and died.

Caleb Bingham wrote that speech and reason are the glory,
redolent of the principles of liberty. His school book
speeches, memorized by generations of students,
poured their floods of light into schoolboy mouths.

To improve the noblest faculties of our nature,
Caleb Bingham taught speech and reason. Such glory,
with speeches memorized by generations of students,
to scatter the clouds of ignorance and error.

To erradiate the benighted mind with beams of truth,
improve the noblest ideals of our nature,
scatter the dark clouds of ignorance and error,
and remove the film of prejudice from the mental eye.

To radiate his hungry mind with beams of truth,
Frederick Douglass at age 13 bought his first book,
electrifying his tongue with this radical thought: great speech
might help remove the film of prejudice from the nation’s eyes.

Modern Woodmen of America

When founded in 1883, MWA was open only to white men aged 18 to 45, living in the rural areas of twelve Mid-Western states, who met the fraternity’s strict health, employment, and moral requirements. By 1900, it was among the largest of the 188 fraternal life insurance companies in the US, with several million members.

It starts with a three-wheeled goat, led
by men with faces obscured by black cloth.
The men’s job is to make it buck and reel,
The goat’s job is to wear two sharp horns,
while the initiate’s hands are tied, his eyes

blinded by goggles called hoodwinks.
If you can stay on the goat’s bucking back,
you are transformed from stranger to neighbor.
Neighbors can purchase axes, the symbols
(along with the wedge and the mallet)

of progress. Neighbors learn the passwords
for entry, the secret handshake, and can buy
life insurance. This toy goat is deadly serious business,
serious as a skull and cross bones.
Don’t we all long to be conjoined

in fraternity, to join hands by the north wall
of the lodge with the Forest Patriarch
in his long gray robe? Cut down
the towering hardwoods leaning
into a barrel-vault sky, and soon the tender

poplar and the delicate peeling birch
will follow in the wake of deforestation.
The Woodman’s future is always bathed
in pink morning light. After passing the test,
neighbors will gather you up in the arms

of true manhood, for they have also triumphed
in the face of obstacles, and when they
finally succumb to death, as inevitably
we all must, they’ll have provided well
for their widows and their children.

Whaler

Out of New Bedford and Nantucket, from 1820-1860

The captain knows never to set sail on Friday,
You don’t curse your voyage before it’s begun.
After only four days we come to the ice fields,
studded like diamonds with hillocks. I lean

over the taffrail to see how they bob
up and down on the swells. The tops blinding white,
while below a strange green, as bright as spring blades.
The bergy-bits jostle against the thick hull,

lumpen shapes overlaid like shingles; they scatter
before the wide prow in a sudden clear passage.
If the steward or mate dreams of milking or plowing,
we will find seals: bladdernose, saddleback,

and their fat yellow pups lounging atop
the pack ice in droves. But seals are merely
loose change. For the real money
we must sail further, keep constant watch

for a breach of tail or puffs of cloud
steaming up from a blowhole. Sometimes
the smell comes first—greasy, heavy—
then the head rises as large as a house;

a shout and all the boats loosed from their davits.
The boatswain orders pull harder; we put
our backs to it, hoping to get well in range
before she plunges, to make fast

with the harpoon gun, to see the ropes
uncoil beneath our seats, and the bow
leap into the freezing salt spray
and fly, fly toward our made fortunes.

Featured image Clifford Warren Ashley, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This poem is 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.

Today the Subaru time machine climbs
the hills of Petersburg, stopping
for photos of bygone barns and part-

buried tractors, their plows and blades
splayed like seeds of weeds. Over there:
the Flowerdew Hundred and the first

windmill of North America. Over there:
the Beefsteak Raid, when Confederates
paid for 2000 cattle with the lives of 14 men.

Autumn orange soybeans await the reaper.
Roots reach deeper for clean water
as the salt sea rises from underneath.

I let vultures teach me about what was
and what will be pulled from bones,
marrow of hidden history: locals burned

the Petersburg courthouse on purpose
to hide the heritage of a few wives
from New Orleans. When I sneak

across ditches for shots of ruins under
giant trees, I hear laughter in the leaves,
smell blood and gasoline coming up

like truth from luscious cotton fields.
Soon newer machines will capture
growing snow and beans rattling

in the breeze. I keep going down
roads reverting to stone and dirt.
To this day, every September

the county honors the fallen of the raid
with an auction and steak dinner.

Featured image Bubba73, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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.”

Featured image Sanzzu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This poem is 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.

5/10/1869 The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad

We only have the names of three:
Ging Cui, Wong Fook, Lee Chao.

In the history books, they just say
“Chinese” and credit the courage

that it took for four tycoons to put
up the capital to give America

her easy miles. For them, the West
may as well have been Jupiter, a

roiling rock to be pounded on from
sunrise to sunset. Yet on half the average

monthly wage, a diet void of fresh
produce or livestock, they forged

the iron roads, driving spikes and
digging tunnels, and when the day

was at its most hot, some exploded
and turned to ghosts. On a promontory

they watched the last spike, made of
the gold that was promised, driven

into the final empty hole. The work
was done, the hammer thrown down,

and they could now be considered
fellow citizens and not celestials.

Featured image “B&H”, illustrator; sketch by Joesph Becker (1841-1910), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons