I had originally written this back in September of 2016, after many months of heaviness, tears, and prayer. It was also an election year (how could we forget?) and things were crazy then, but not as crazy as now. I’ve changed a few things for the sake of coherency, and added a couple new thoughts, as well as Langston Hughes’ poem. Growing up, he was one of my favorite poets whose raw, hopeful, pained and striking words nurtured my own fragile voice. Today they are still as powerful and nurturing to me, and more so. This post comes with the hope that this nation repents and recovers from her narcissism, and that we, with true true humility and acceptance, realize the power and role that we have in helping America grow into maturity without ourselves resorting to narcissistic tyranny.

Let America Be America Again

We fell in love with your curvaceous hills, orange pink purple skies, luscious fertile valleys, and all the golden promises of milk and honey and overflowing rivers of provision.

Beautiful America, we were seduced by your landscapes that offered us better dreams.

You are one of the first wombs of my parents’ love; under your gaze they birthed three lives, one which was stolen too soon, two which grew into headstrong trees–two hybrid daughters with tiger-striped souls of red, white, and bruised.

I am one of those daughters, birthed in the aftermath of blood-spilled divisions and immigrant dreams of peace in the promised land; I belong in the forbidden ocean space between two nations, two identifications, two dreams.

But Beautiful America, my innocent heart loved you like a child would love the mother who shuns her, ignores her, shushes her, tells her to be silent, to behave; hides her when better company is over, praises her only for the benefits her cleverness can bring, but kicks her when she asks for affection. I loved you like a bastard child loves his father and aches for his father’s approval, his father’s attention.

But, Beautiful America–a childhood filled with such cold rejection and hot manipulation can only turn a heart, and so my adolescence fought loving you; years of starvation for your affection turned to bitter waters and jaded ire.

I cursed you as a traitorous lover; I wanted to disown you, to destroy you, emancipate myself from the illusion of your promises and purple mountain glory; you who continued to flaunt your power and cruel beauty–I hated and desired your brazen confidence, your arrogant freedom that you said could be for everyone, everyone, everyone–but I had already learned to doubt your honeyed words, heard the lament-songs of my brothers and sisters of all the colors black and sepia keys and swore I would never again be seduced by your empty promises.

Beautiful America. My bitter heart vowed to never again be Echo to your Narcissus, no, no. No. I would not love you.

But then. I see your devastated streets littered with bullets, blood, broken families and broken bones and broken dreams, your dark vows collecting their payment in the blood and sweat and tears of the innocent.

I see your continued cruelty to your children, the children of your youth and adolescence whom you raised on stolen lands in chains, cotton rows, railroad tracks, and labor camps…do our tears and awakened cries shame you? Embarrass you? Is it too hard to look into our tired eyes? To ask for forgiveness? To say you were wrong to enslave us, shun us, abuse us, use us to grow strong and then imprison and silence us, fear and burn our midnight beauty, our rich wit, our faithful sun-drenched sweat, and tiger-striped souls that could only make you more beautiful, is it too hard to abandon your pain and pride, finally, and look yourself in an untampered mirror? Is it impossible for you to finally break free from your own chains?

Beautiful America. Why, when I should be angry and spurn the lover who spurned me first, why, when I should be gloating at your demise saying eye for an eye and tooth for tooth, be ruined cruel lover I’m done with you; why, instead of these petty but justifiable sentiments, why, instead, do I want to run to your side, hold you in my arms, kiss your broken bones and bleeding bruises and whisper like a mother to her child–yes, that’s it–like a mother to her child because finally my heart opens with the dawning that it was never us who needed your mothering, but you who need ours…

So I whisper–

“America, I’m here, I won’t abandon you. I still believe in you, that you are so much better than this. You are so much better than this. You can be whole.”

And here is the secret hidden inside my stony heart that is crumbling and breaking for you because of the One who can draw even honey from the rock:

America, the Beautiful, I still have hope for you.

*Notes:

The song “America the Beautiful” was originally penned as a poem by Katharine Lee Bates, who was also “a social activist interested in the struggles of women, workers, people of color, tenement residents, immigrants, and poor people.^[1][2] She helped organize the Denison House, a college women’s settlement house, with other women friends and colleagues in 1892.^[1]:110 She wrote and spoke extensively about the need for social reform^[2] and was an avid advocate for the global peace movement that emerged after World War I. She was especially active in attempts to establish the League of Nations.^[1][2] Long an active Republican, Bates broke with the party to endorse Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis in 1924 because of Republican opposition to American participation in the League of Nations. She said: “Though born and bred in the Republican camp, I cannot bear their betrayal of Mr. Wilson and their rejection of the League of Nations, our one hope of peace on earth.”^[7]Thinking of herself as a “global citizen,” Bates decried the American policy of isolationism.^[1]” (taken from Wikipedia. I know it’s not the greatest source but since this isn’t a research paper…:))