On Hearing Jimi's Star-Spangled Banner, Georgia Speedway, July 4, 1970

Anthem of Revolution, psychedelic pledge
of our youth, carrying in your machine gun distortions,
bursting bomb decibels, feedback choked screams,
our protests, our cries of love go over
the parched Georgia fields and pecan groves
with you.

Renew this living flag of dirty, hung-over,
runaway children of America—hippies,
bikers, students, Hare Krishnas, bare-breasted girls—
dancing here in this field, with jagged rhythms,
deconstructed improvisations, whose wind
of guitar riffs lifts us up.

Deliver this snake biting its own tail,
this tie-dyed, makeshift camp of refugees,
to the country of peace and love it imagines.

Where fathers shout, Don’t let the door hit you
in the ass on the way out, where leaders promise
that Vietnam is over yet send troops to Cambodia,
where Baptists call a monk’s self-immolation
a Buddhist barbecue,
what can truth and wisdom be.

Whose new nation gathered in the 115 degree heat,
beside a brown river, slow-moving miasma
of field discharge and industrial flush
this Fourth of July weekend,
welcomed cooling racetrack fire hose blasts
while sheriffs’ deputies smiled at our brave nakedness
shining like new peaches after a rain.
How could Gov. Madox arrest 150,000 peaches
in the state of Georgia.

Midnight whippoorwill of our generation,
whose call echoes through this festival in the pines,
can your music keep us from dancing,
our minds from building an invisible university,
bodies from living on light and dust,
meditations from focusing on nothing much.

Whose love brings us heroes then makes
them burn-outs, tragedies at twenty-seven.

Then the sky exploded in falling blue rivers
of independence day stars, shrieking firebirds
gold and green spiraling toward the moon,
and a sustained guitar note climbed the night sky,
a final taps-like warning.
No playing behind his back, no burning
his guitar tonight, Jimi unplugged and left
the stage, an after image in the darkness,
ground-thundering detonations
vibrating every eardrum every sternum.

3:35 pm - 4:35 pm, November 5, 1962 in Camelot

(the only hour on record when no one died)

This is an eternal hour of a fall day with no promises
to keep that you know of, no one making predictions
or prophecies about it on television or the street
corner. It is perfect, November, afternoon,
but you will barely hear a long-haired girl sing
“Blowing in the Wind” and look across an empty
college lecture hall at one black student, alone
as she is, because you are not there, you are only
watching a secret service film clip shot from outside
the only open door in Mississippi.

And tall, silver trees, lining Pennsylvania Avenue
since Lincoln’s day, dropping their last leaves
in a light breeze, hardly seem like the ominous weapons
of a few days ago to you, opening at this hour
the French doors overlooking the wide lawn,
because in your atonement you are remembering
a similar day last year, sailing in a golden bay
with your arm around someone never coming back,
and without the cool air blowing through the doors
or line of black limousines entering the gates,
your brief daydreaming would go unnoticed
in the black and white paparazzi photos.

This is how you might have written about this hour—
several pages have been excised from your journal—
this capital sky clearer than Seattle’s Space Needle
vision of the future, this Aquarian news of a man
one day sailing off in a space ship to the moon
where no one has ever been turned away or died.