Featured Poem: Here is a map of our country

 

by Adrienne Rich

Here is a map of our country:

here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt

This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin

we dare not taste its water

This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms

This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms

This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy

This is the cemetery of the poor

who died for democracy     This is a battlefield

from a nineteenth-century war     the shrine is famous

This is the sea-town of nymph and story    when the fishing fleets

went bankrupt   here is where the jobs are    on the pier

processing frozen fishsticks   hourly wages and no shares

These are other battlefields   Centralia   Detroit

here are the forests primeval    the copper   the silver lodes

These are the suburbs of acquiescence   silence rising fumelike

from the streets

This is the capital of money and dolor whose spires

flare up through air inversions whose bridges are crumbling

whose children are drifting blind alleys pent

between coiled rolls of razor wire

I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural

then yes it it be   these are small distinctions

where do we see it from is the question

 

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