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[Music intro]
LYNNE THOMPSON: Hello! My name is Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and I’m so happy to welcome listeners to this installment of Poems on Air, a podcast supported by the Los Angeles Public Library. Every week, I’ll present the work of poets I admire, poets who you should know, and poets who have made a substantial and inimitable contribution to the art and craft of poetry.
LYNNE THOMPSON: For poets and poetry lovers alike, the appointment of a U.S. Poet Laureate is cause for celebration and this celebration is quite apparent—see print and social media—for the recent appointment of Ada Limón. Born in Sonoma, California, Limón is the recipient of multiple awards and the author of six collections of poetry including the recently-released The Hurting Kind. Of her poems, Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco has said they’re “both soft and tender, enormous and resounding, [and[ her poetic gestures entrance and transfix.”
LYNNE THOMPSON: Today’s poem is "A New National Anthem" by Ada Limón.
A New National Anthem
The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets’ red glare” and then there are the bombs. (Always, always there is war and bombs.) Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw even the tenacious high school band off key. But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call to the field, something to get through before the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps the truth is that every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal snaking underneath us as we blindly sing the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the flag, how it undulates in the wind like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled, brought to its knees, clung to by someone who has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon, when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can love it again, until the song in your mouth feels like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung by even the ageless woods, the shortgrass plains, the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright, that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on, that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit in an endless cave, the song that says my bones are your bones, and your bones are my bones, and isn’t that enough?
LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Public Library and this podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!
[Music outro]
- Back to Poems on Air: Episode 69
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