Tag Archives: national anthem

Ada Limón’s visionary poems and a New World Order just around the corner.

Posted on May 26, 2020 | Leave a comment

A New National Anthem Ada Limón

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?

The Leash

BY ADA LIMÓN

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear

the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,

the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,

that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw

that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s

left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned

orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can

you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek

bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into

your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to

say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish

comes back belly up, and the country plummets

into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still

something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.

But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing

like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move

my living limbs into the world without too much

pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight

toward the pickup trucks break-necking down

the road, because she thinks she loves them,

because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud

roaring things will love her back, her soft small self

alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,

until I yank the leash back to save her because

I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,

and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings

high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay

her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.

Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards

the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love

from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,

like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together

peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

could you give a rat’s?

Posted on January 21, 2013 | Leave a comment

Australia Day is a scorcher. Couldn’t I just go to the counter and get my certificate? I’ve been in this country for decades, voting, using expressions like beaut and good on ya. When people ask how I am I don’t say Well, thank you, I say Good.

I want to go down the beach. That’s what it means to be an Aussie. But here I am, lining up with a hundred and forty others at Hawthorn Town Hall armed with a pledge, a badge and a tissue in case I wet myself or find something up my nose, travelling south. After thirty years I’m here to become Australian.

The foyer is like a holding pen at a shearers’ bash in Bourke. Hordes are milling, spruced like dogs’ dinners. The Indian women are splendid in saris of ochre, turquoise and peacock green, their piercings are elegant and exotic. But the men look uncomfortable in cheap, dark suits that are too big. Their stiff collars ride up under their ears. Think Aziz in Passage to India. They wear ties. What are they?

This is unAustralian but secretly I hope it will take on. Something needs to replace tracky-dacks and tee-shirts and homage to stretch everything. Australians dress like their children. Tits, bums and balls bounce about like pumpkins on party drugs. It’s enough to put you off your rocket salad.

There’s a pair of white runners. One, mercifully. White runners have spread like a bad virus world wide with all generations infected, particularly older Australians and grey nomads in RSL clubs who can be spotted eating the Roast of the Day using a Seniors Card and spilling gravy on these ugly bunion concealers. You wouldn’t catch me dead in a pair. This pair is on a fellow Pommy which is typical and ironic since the British neither walk nor run. They drink and make a lot of noise. The British are responsible for introducing several bad practices to this country and bad dress is only one of them. Whingeing and queueing are others.

As a Pom myself, I feel uncomfortable and faintly passé. I shouldn’t be here at all. Not any more. Not at my age. I should have stayed home in the cold, moaning about the Government, the weather, the price of petrol, resigned to my ugly regional accent that I still haven’t managed to disguise.

We’re given numbers and herded into the hall. It’s like lining up at Safeway for a roast chook on a Saturday morning. Aussies now accept queuing, so new citizens will have no trouble assimilating here. Australians are now so good at waiting in lines that they will camp out for days in the hope of getting a ticket to the cricket, a 60c stamp, fifty dollars of their own money, and for the chance to get to work over the Westgate Bridge.

Surrounded by these young hopefuls with smiling, distinctly non-Western faces, I think, What can I contribute to this country now; arthritis, early onset dementia, general irritation with everything?

Anyway, there’s not another country that would take me now. The US might, temporarily, but only if I came with a Latino accent, a toilet duck and a scrubbing brush. Sweden wouldn’t because I’m not a natural blond and I’ve so far resisted the temptations of IKEA. France wouldn’t take me because I won’t eat brains and I don’t piss in the street. I shave my underarms and I think the parterre at Versailles has no charm.

At the end of the ceremony, (pronounced cereMONY, thanks America), it was time to sing the National Anthem. Our new citizens didn’t have a hope of getting through this in spite of the words on the screen but they tried very hard. In this way they were fully assimilated already. Not the trying hard bit. The Prime Minister is the only Australian who can sing our anthem. The rest ofAustralia, particularly footballers lined up before a match with vacant eyes and emptier heads couldn’t give a rat’s arse. And that’s another expression a New Arrival’s going to find handy.

Our land is ….WHAT?? Girt by sea. Yeah! Work that one out.

Our new citizens are younger than me. I have the whitest, wrinkliest skin, the shortest name and the widest arse, except for one obvious American in patterned Crimplene. She is girt by lard.

When presented as Australian, many cried, overcome with emotion. I felt embarrassed about being old, privileged and British and past my best-by date. But I would like to assure you that I would still chant Warnie, Warnie, if he appeared on our cricket pitch rubbing a red stain into his white pants. I even let my cynical self go and cried when Bindi got up and spoke about her dad, and continued to sniffle as I watched the ute nose its way out of the Crocoseum.

It could be that I’m a true blue Aussie after all; a mongrel, like the rest a youse.