Praise song
Alleluia to the well-armed, they say,
alleluia to the buyers and investors,
alleluia to the machinery of power.
In the shopping centers and the prison buses,
in the hospitals and the bombed-out cities,
in the occupied streets,
say alle-fucking-luia, they demand,
pointing their AR-15s at our temples.
Nothing I have tried has made us safe,
not marching, not letters, not ballots.
I have to resort to joy.
Once, a child handed me a jalapeño
grown from seed I’d gifted him.
Bite, he said. I bit.
My eyes teared up with heat.
He laughed with pride.
I bit again, both of us laughing.
That is as close to purpose
as I have ever gotten.
I don’t know what to do about this world.
But I will stuff joy down its muzzle
and light the powder.
Alle-fucking-luia, I’ll say,
to all our burning tongues.
Claire Hermann’s work has appeared as a Split This Rock Poem of the Week, in Poet Lore, Prime Number, One, and elsewhere and has been nominated for Best of the Net. Her chapbook, Mixed State, is published by Dancing Girl Press.
Read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Header photo by Krishnajith K, courtesy Pixabay.
