Ode To Americans

By Bill Pony

Americans, your people steered across
That angered ocean, their small ships embossed
In history books where mothers tend their dying sick
Embroiled in vague regrets with storms so thick
Attacking man and wood that water's edge,
Reduced to maddening grey across the wedge
Where bow had threaded tossing waves for leagues
Beyond the distance most had traveled all their lives
Before their fateful voyage across those Straits
Between the past and future, those vast Gates
Of Time through which our wounded country's fate
Endured Manassas, Bull Run, Two World Wars
Between ourselves, the Europeans, far
Removed from past remorse, astride
The Pale Horse of epidemics, bonafide
Entries into afterlife through greatest strife
Of battles filled with people losing life
And limb to stem the staunch
Of blood's swift voyage as bodies launched
Of those who died amid the raging seas
Brought European life to you and me
Floated down into the gloom bedraped
In stars and stripes beneath the wakes.

English coffins, every one, beleaguered scenes
In those eternal depths Atlantian between
The Crown and Washington's false teeth
Hand-carved from which a gentle birch beneath
A bluff was hatcheted like that young cherry tree
Boy George cut down with reddening bees
Of flaming muskets tearing flesh from men
Who fought for George the King whose sin
Was taxing those whose leader cut apart
The waxing sinews of that auburn wart
Known as the British Army, each fallen man
Endorned like angered cherries marching grand
Across their father's hills, to death for George
The King and George the General whose forge
Of flaming muskets drove their bullets deep
Twixt jawbone and the shattered eyes that weep
No more in Lethe's rapid death upon the fields,
And bunkered hills where men fall down and yield
Their lives and limbs to liberty.

The shot heard round the world was soft as ice
That cuts upon the swelling seas where twice
Great convoys crossed the great divide of tide
Upon whose shoulders past and future ride
With mounting cannons driven to the edge
Where countries can no longer dredge
Old scars and wars and weapons grand, those things
That kill our spirit, cannonades of death that ring
Our spirit oceans, deep embedded dreams
Of men at peace, mere fantasies, that scream
Within our consciences like scalpel tracks
Left by neurosurgeons in their lack
Of subtlety, who cut so deep the thoughts
That trim, the angry edges cease, so fraught
With scars that nightmare's sickening thud
Of lead into a soldier's body in the mud
No longer draws a sound as patriot soul
Sails that ancient journeyed sea abroil
Where mothers tended mournful dying sick
On cherry-wooded ships that toss upon the lick
Of time itself and edged their ways across
The starry skies twix England and the West
Where people cast their lives into the streams
Beneath the grassy meadows filled with dreams
Of freedom, courage, and the urge to die
The awesome sound, the eagle's ancient cry,
"To death and God, you Doodle brats," the voice
Of deadly charges shout so boisterous
The agony of bullet in the brain seems mild
As though their journey toward the land of wild
Incestuous tribes that languished here
Breathing their last breath of forest air
Before those muskets and disease destroyed
Their lands and dreams. Thus, came
Incessant armies, settlers, trains, the men
And children whose new culture flamed the fire
That burned the Indian out and drew the ire
Of England's George who felt his family torn
Asunder in the darkening thunder, thrown
Into the skies as cherries plucked from life
And limb in freedom's endless strife
Began again the quest of man for freedom
Stirring in that virgin, warring land.

So, now, full circle come Americans who sit
Upon their shores and watch these immigrants
Flood past them so fast and smooth
The staunch of blood from freedom's awesome groove
Just passed them by, and, like the hapless Indians,
They feel their time has come and waned,
As alien hordes take over their fair lands
And drive them down into the bloodying sands
Of time and cultures gone, a waste of strife
That other leaders would not let arrive
Who would secure borders against devilish foes
With careful screening of only those
Who fit our cultural mold, yet now are frost
Upon approaching racial holocaust
Wherein our children will be slain
Within this awesome acid rain
Of rifles, pistols flashing once again as hordes
Of immigrants steal lands and eat the boards
Of ships that sailed from England to the West
Where dying immigrants who sought the best,
Once landed, killed these aborigines.
Just so we died beneath our forest trees
We planted in our yards, shot dead by men
We let get in whose angry voices reached a din
Soon hauling down our flags
And everything we stood for in the slag
Of multicultural madness wrought
By those who in time have just forgot
Those mothers tending sickened loved ones
Death-tossed by endless, golden Suns
As we passively permit our history to end
Upon our shores, our culture's wind
No longer breathing hard and strong, the seas
So stormy there's no time to think, for we
Are guided by untested social engineers
Who tell us loss of culture's dreams is not a fear
For those of heart, that we shall prove our love
Of country through our dying like a wounded dove
Unarmed by passive dissolution, soon to die,
Our mother feeds us as we face demise.

No tossing ocean, only apathy against
That length of space that was our best defense,
That broiling ocean of Atlantian despair
Over which no foreign Naval force might fare.
Yet now, the horde is loosed upon the land
As legitimacy of government is banned
Through open borders and the swell of feet
From distant cultures whose vast hordes defeat
This country's history. For now, we sink beneath
The waves of history, our ship of state a wreath
Of death to culture now diluted with
Diverseness in which liberal myth
Becomes the final dagger, our great voyage
At history's end where there is only noise.

American Civil Rights Review