This week’s poem, “America,” comes to us from poet Martin Steingesser in observance of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. This contemplative poem takes inspiration from Annette Lemieux’s painting “Stampede,” which is part of the Portland Museum of Art’s permanent collection, and the quintessential American bard Walt Whitman.
Steingesser, who served as Portland’s inaugural poet laureate from 2007-09, is author of three books of poems, “Yellow Horses,” “Brothers of Morning” and “The Thinking Heart: the Life & Loves of Etty Hillesum,” the latter also an award-winning performance work. As a performance and teaching artist, he has given presentations and taught writing workshops around the state for over 40 years.
America
By Martin Steingesser
After the multimedia painting “Stampede,” by Annette Lemieux
in an exhibit titled “The Appearance of Sound”
Knee high combat boots parading in tight formation
come goose stepping, as if to march over us.
But what of the artist’s closed, heavy wooden door
upright dead center in front of the painting, standing
firm as a sentry between jackboots and the bystanders?
And now caught among them, the crushing cadence
goes hammering past long and long—and I hear
the pounding fists, boots kicking, breaking down the door.
What if I leave, turn, looking back, leave and again look back
even if only in mind’s eye, imagining a voice no one else
would conjure and hear, Walt Whitman’s, one of the roughs
of grass and love—a way he fancied talking of himself,
his last words in “Song of Myself,” as he wrote, the “Poem
of an American”—Look for me under your boot soles, I stop
somewhere waiting for you; and him, no espouser of religion,
calling up how children of the damned keep turning up.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “America” copyright © 2021 by Martin Steingesser, was previously published in the MWPA’s 2021 Artword. It appears by permission of the author.
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