POETRY & ESSAY CONTEST

There was a good question posed the other day about a subject not often talked about: Poetry. It’s an everyday subject to poets, who hope to transcend the everyday normalcy in what they write, but to most of us it is something usually thought of at times of celebrations, anniversaries, remembrances, and often highlighted at historical times. It seems fitting to discuss that subject’s history, as we have one of those events coming up, in the 250th anniversary of our nation’s 1776 founding.

The question was, ‘What is the best poem written lately, as it reflects on the United States of America?’. I will for today define ‘lately’, to be the last hundred years, and will reveal my bias that prior to that point, in my humble opinion (IMHO), the best poem regarding our country was, ‘Song of the Open Road’, written by Walt Whitman in the 1840s. Its last line reads, ‘Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?’ I believe the American answer is still, and even more so today, ‘yes’.

At a mile marker of 250 years, when many historical empires, influences, and epochs have found themselves on the wane, we find our country on an ascendancy, having a second wind, that will portend through its third century.