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Transcript

America Is the Poem

for Donald Trump’s Second Presidential Inauguration
 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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