Poems for America

5 July 2018

John Shea tells a story of a teacher who gets presents from some of the students every Christmas. He comes to know that a long narrow box means handkerchiefs. He gets in the habit of stacking them up in the closet without opening them until one at a time he needs a handkerchief. Some years later he opens one of the boxes to find a gold pocket watch on a chain. It had been there all along for who knows how many years. Life is like that. We often don’t know what gifts we have been given.

Chris Staiger was a young man in our confirmation class one year, the same year as Kirk Jr. Chris was getting married and wanted to get confirmed in the church. Soon after came the marriage and then his father died. I had visited his father in the hospital in Carroll County, the same hospital where my mother years later would begin her journey home. When Gene Staiger died, I accompanied his wife, Janet, Chris’s mother, to a quiet little cemetery on a hilltop in western Maryland for the burial. It was a full day’s journey, but one could find no more beautiful and serene final resting place. While waiting for the funeral director to arrive, Janet and I watched Eastern Bluebirds flying around about the business of their day. 

After that, Janet began to volunteer in the St. Peter’s office, helping with the bulletins, the newsletter and such. She decided we needed new doors and got Pella to come out and install two new doors into the office as a gift to the church. After some time Janet became ill with cancer. I would bring her communion at home, visit in the hospital, and we would talk about God. She always wanted to know more about God and Jesus, until it was time for her to join her beloved Gene on that quiet hilltop far away.

One Christmas Janet, knowing of my love of poetry, gave me the gift of a book: Poems for America: 125 Poems That Celebrate The American Experience, edited by Carmela Ciuraru. The dust jacket has a picture of a somewhat tarnished 48 star American Flag, a paining by Jasper Johns from 1954. I sent my thank you note, and thanked Janet in person, but like the teacher in the story, laid it aside to be opened down the road apiece.

When I did, I was teaching American Literature and American History at a girl’s boarding school. The girls were from around the world; 24 different countries and across America. The book is pure gold. American history, its triumphs and its failures in verse. Three Hundred Years of what Billy Collins rightfully calls “the full chorus of America singing!” One learns on the first page that the first published poet in America was Anne Bradstreet. A woman, living in the seventeenth century colonies. Less than a hundred years later the first African American published poet is Phillis Wheatley, a woman, and a household slave. The last poem in the book is by the contemporary American Indian poet, Sherman Alexie. In between are the experiences of nearly every kind of American imaginable, offering deep insights into what some call the American experiment.

Time spent sitting with any one of these poems promises deep insights into what American has been and what it still can be. The chapters of this experiment have still to be lived, experienced and written. We rarely stop to take the time to do this in the ways that these 125 poems do. One needs more than one box of handkerchiefs to wander through the 300 years of poetic reflection on who we are and where we have been. Poems for America, edited by Carmela Ciuraru. Thank you, Janet, once again for the gift of your spirit as it lives in these poems.