Historian

A world of vanished nations in your head
You lie tonight without a thought to spare
Anything but the wind that downs the leaves
As fall fells summer air

This

Do I still like America? Yes and no.
The question is a trap. That much I know.
Nice place, from sea to rising sea, which we
Do not know how to love. Land of the fee, 
Hypocrite, hipster and the toil-turned hand,
The heritage we think we understand,
Oh and it’s where I was born. As for races
(Black, white, rat, electoral) the disgraces
Impress more than that song of spacious skies,
Let alone Rushmore’s mountain maladies.
And I have stomached too much hullabaloo
From kneejerk Nothings making much ado
Beneath blue sky in whose light the foul claws
Dig for the carcass of the grey Lost Cause,
Then hearing wind now colder up the hill
Blow like a race-myth looting people’s will.
Where to? To get space from rhetorical muck,
I’ll run my mind here through my town. And look
Here I am. Store. Gazebo. School. Signs. DANGER:
CONSTRUCTION. Where I learned to be a stranger
Is where I’m from. In between sky and earth
Are many berths but never a second birth.
I’m woozy. Best sit down. And then they start,
Those dead dreams once more beating up my heart
Wrapped in that starstruck banner. So it is,
God damn it. Can’t just walk away from this.

Born in DC and raised largely in Maryland, A. Z. Foreman is a literary translator and poet currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. His translations from Latin, Occitan, Russian, Old Irish and Yiddish have appeared in sundry publications including Metamorphoses, Blue Unicorn, Asymptote, Brazen Head and the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. He sometimes writes his own poetry if it really comes to that.

Image: Presidio of Monterey, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons