GOODBYE, AMERICA (he said)

I watched his face,
his smile,
heard what he had to say
and came
to
this:
how small he
looked and it struck
me as
incongruous how a
man supposed to be so
large, expected to be
so large,
looked so
tiny
and a swell of anger
began
(and
rattles in me still)
over
how some
one
could do so little with
so
much.
the emptiness.
the damage.
the dead and the lives
so much less,
now.
the carnage.
and so comes a new
day,
a new man
a new idea, and while throngs
wait with breath bated
and with hopes
rekindled
I am left with this:
more us,
perhaps,
and less him.
and, isn’t that the idea of
THE
GREAT
EXPERIMENT,
after all.
we got lazy with our
lazyboys
and American
idolators
and pulling ourselves
up with the bootstraps
of others.
now
is
the
time
to retake not control,
for that
seems
far too rife with conceit,
but
a partnership, the partnership
in
the
dream,
whatever that now means
to you and you and me
and
them,
and to
let
the
answer – the answers –
be in the doing
not
in
what
gets
done. That was America.
Ours.
Not his.
Never his.
But finally, ours,
maybe,
again.
the opportunity.
another
chance.