Two Poems by Alison Luterman

Little American Song

And aren’t we humans
magnificent tonight aren’t we brilliant
because didn’t we invent fireworks
didn’t we make flowers explode in the sky?

And aren’t we singing lustily an old drinking song
converted to national anthem, and didn’t we invent language
and math and cave paintings and the printing press
and poetry and the atom bomb?

And remember way back when we first learned
to harness fire and thought we were gods?
Remember us parading around in our barely-there bearskins,
making babies and fighting mastodons and dying young,
straggling little bands of us without fur or fangs or claws,
whoever would have guessed that we’d survive this long?

And weren’t we cute, aren’t we still adorable today
having tailgate parties and barbecues
and singing our insatiable hearts out
while the whole thing burns,
sea surface temperatures breaking all records last week,
while in India birds are dropping dead right out of the trees?

And still we’re buying new microwave ovens
and lawn chairs from Costco
and driving our cars, music blasting, air conditioners on high
trying to get away from the baking asphalt of here
to some as-yet-undiscovered foreign paradise

Except there’s nowhere to go anymore it’s all ablaze
and we know that in our bones don’t we
because we are so exceedingly smart
even if our smartness is more than half the problem–

Still, remember, we once invented democracy,
and are somehow continuing to sing
even as our brief dazzling reign flames out
with a sizzle and a bang
and a shower of falling stars.

*

Honeymoon Trip to the Capital, 2009

Lincoln looked lonely on his alabaster throne,
as if he knew the fragile union he’d staked his life on

was destined to fray for decades to come,
and that the Civil War he’d won

for a time would never really end.
We gaped up at him in a light gray rain,

having wandered from monument to monument.
before returning that night to our hotel

with its little sample soaps and luxuriant pillows.
This was a lifetime ago, when the President

was Black, and an actual person.
But even then, the war-torn waste

of generations was a miasma rising
from cemented-over swamps,

and we couldn’t help but breathe it in,
a fine grit suffusing the very air

of this city, built by the enslaved,
with its acres and acres of decorous graves.

*

Alison Luterman’s five books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly, Desire Zoo, In the Time of Great Fires, and Hard Listening. She also writes plays, song lyrics, and personal essays. She has taught at New College, The Writing Salon, Catamaran, Esalen and Omega Institutes and writing workshops around the country, as well as working as a California poet in the schools for many years.