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.
America Is the Poem
for Donald Trump’s Second Presidential Inauguration
Jan 17, 2025
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