| |
SAMPLE
WRITING OF
JOHN HAINES
- An Alaskan State Laureate - |
|
|
|
THE AMERICAN
DREAM |
It would have to be something dark,
glazed as in a painting. A corridor
leading back to a forgotten neighborhood
where a ball is bounced from street
to street, and we hear from a far corner
the vendor's cry in a city light.
It would have to be dusk, long after
sunlight has failed. A shrouded figure
at the prow of a ship, staring
and pointing - as if one might see
into that new land still unventured,
and beyond it, coal dust and gaslight,
vapors of an impenetrable distance.
Too many heroes, perhaps: a MacArthur
striding the Philippine shallows; a sports
celebrity smeared with a period color.
A voice in the air: a Roman orator
declaiming to an absentee Forum
the mood of their failing republic.
It would have to be night. No theater
lights, a dated performance shut down.
And in one's fretful mind a ghost
in a rented cassock pacing the stage,
reciting to himself a history:
"Here were the elected Elders, chaired
and bewigged. And placed before them
the Charter: they read it aloud,
pass it with reverence from hand to hand.
"Back there in the curtained shadows
the people's chorus waited, shifting
and uncertain; but sometimes among them
a gesture, a murmur of unrest.
"And somewhere here, mislaid, almost
forgotten, the meaning of our play,
its theme and blunted purpose ..."
John Haines
1998
|
 |
|
|