America Is the Poem

           for Donald Trump’s 
           Second Presidential Inauguration 
           January 20, 2025


Rain washes the dust from train windows 
as we barrel through the poem of America.
From New York to Chicago, I watch it scroll by—
frame by frame and line by line.

        Rivers and lakes reflect the pale winter sky
and haunt my vision. 
                 America, what you were, 
and will be again—I see you 
in silos rising like fists from farmland.
America, the land itself says, “Fight!”

America, I see you in chipped brick walls 
stained with faded logos. 
                I see you there, waiting 
to rise from gone-under towns
and cities spangled in endless dusk.

               We can see you now
emerging from boarded-up corner bars,
baseball fields barbed with weeds,
hollowed-out churches
and factories folded in on themselves
like crushed cans reclaimed by the wild. 

               And we see you, and we know you 
in ragtag families packed into vehicles 
to head to church on a Sunday, 
or to visit a grandfather who remembers war 
and what it means to survive 
for love of the country that survives because of him
and his brothers—gone.

America, for love, we go on. 

        America, you defy the narratives 
imposed to poison your majesty.
All the poison imposed 
to warp us away from our axis:
the true, the beautiful, what binds us
to a shared reality 
sealed under the hand of God.

     Americans, may we all wake 
to the dawn, this day,
with courage, 
for we are the whirlwind 
promised by patriots 
who fought to the depth 
of a last breath 
to birth America.
And we are here—
there is no other time—
to watch her rise again.

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California is as beautiful as it is volatile, and I tried to capture that dynamic in many of the poems I wrote while living there.

Lost Coast

A cragged stack

in the gathering gray

surf, crowded by

seabirds,

their prehistoric

profiles. We

pull over

to argue, not

to talk,

but the words

won’t form—

the terrain

overtakes them.

Bright litter

drifts into

sand and

small stones

at our feet.

Across the

street, cows

corral behind

barbed wire,

stock-still

in each other’s

shadows. We

don’t need words

to read the sun’s

angle. We know

it will soon be

too dim

to navigate

the switchbacks

without guardrails

we descended

to arrive.

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I’m working toward financing a cross-country train trip this fall. I’ll write during the entire journey and share my travel poems here exclusively.

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I hope you’re all having a terrific summer!

With gratitude for your readership—

Joseph

Without a Thought

"The eternity of things astonishes a brief duration."
—George Oppen

next door a television
mumbles into dusk
gathering night

*

following the breath
night flows through
the form of the room

*

the morning of the last day
—stripes of light fall
across an unmade bed

*

in the corner
of the room
morning
light
collapsing

*

wait,
the wind
will untangle

the pond
from the sky

*

web stretched
between shrubs

snares wind
siphoning sun

*

when the rain reminds you
you’re alive
before it begins to fall

*

quiet
but for a moth
caught in the lampshade

A Way Through

When the poem reminds you
you’re breathing, alive
within a language
that leaves you
wordless, even as
grief pixelates
the hour
and this voice
that serves
as company
and compass
in summer’s dark
draws you toward
the margin, what
the words wash up
against, wrack zone
of sound, rubble
of sound, from which
morning emerges.
Through gaping sun
gnats amble in a spiral
vanishing into traffic.