Here’s a poem I wrote for my father-in-law. Bill Trenfield was powerfully interested in history and the good of society. He was a professor of education at Ball State University, a profession he chose because he believed he could help make his country a better place by helping it to become better educated. We had many discussions about the history of the United States, some of them calm and analytic, some of them very impassioned. One of the last requests he made of me was to provide him with a history of the Twenty-First Century. I had not completed that project by the time he died, and so I wrote this poem as partial amends for that failure to read at the family memorial service.

For Bill

I was born in a land where a man
Could murder his president
And his president could lie boldly
About his mighty deeds
And persons of all sorts could be
On lists that struck them from
The life they might propose.

I have lived where hangings took place
And men with guns could come at night
And roust you for your darker skin
And shoot you on your porch
Or hang you from your own tree
Your children in awe and terror at your feet
Your house burning behind you.

I have stood where brother traded rounds with brother
Ankle deep in the blood of their friends and lovers
Raising howls that will shake for centuries
All the houses touched by their bloody hands
The twisted face of their sister turning away
Fixed forever in their lives and stories
Handed down and handed down.

I have wept in the night to know
The whispering ghosts around me
Who have touched this ancient land’s dimensions
Have climbed its peaks and measured its flows
And found the one sun that brings warmth to all
And the springs that feed the secret rivers
And sprouts the cornrows under feet.

I have watched while looting men and women
Gathered oil from all the world
From desert sands and jungle leaves
To warm the houses they will vacate
For noisy rides across the country
Pleasures too deep to be distracted
By the hollow eyes that guide their path.

I have burned to find the hope
That there is soup in nine kettles
For the one who has hungered
That the task required will fit
The hand that takes it up
That the child who lacks love finds it
And mothering arms surround him.

Somehow, Presidents’ Day seemed the right one to put this poem forward again. We are a country that does not respect history much unless it is passed through the lens of myth making. My generation, the much maligned and often hated boomers, were the last to be taught as fact that George Washington had confessed to having chopped down a cherry tree as part of an elaborate ritual where the stories of our country’s struggle were treated much as the Santa Claus story is treated–a repeated myth revealed at last after the spirit of Christmas that the story embodies has been inculcated.

We are a post-modernist country, as Steven Colbert so often points out, where what is is much less important than what we wish it were. So the Westward movement is the heroic struggle of Europeans settling a land in need of taming rather than a peculiar invasion where the leading element was civilian and consisted in large part of women and children whose deaths would then justify military action. How very Roman of us.

The painting is by Kathy’s great-grandmother Stephenson. We photographed it at her aunt’s house in Lubbock.