Anybody know a good poem about Australia turning into America.?

Answer 1

AMERICA
- David Rowbotham

America saved my life. I should like to
admit this conviction, free of fancy,
as the lasting reality time made of it.

It has been a long life. America, with whose
servicemen I shared a Pacific War perimeter
in a world of total combat, flew in
penicillin. While I was still in field
hospital, Truman dropped the Atom Bomb,
sending troops who had lived on their nerves
far too long half crazy in the night; and
guaranteeing my return home. Subsequently
I was to turn to America for periodic
residence, and to be given it amongst the
most generous people I have known. During
one sojourn, American oak broke a bad fall
that could have removed me as the Pacific
nearly did. At the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota,
where for several years I was a visitor,
cortisone was discovered; it sustains
breathing, and for that purpose I require it.

Hence this series of Poems For America,
given the specific title of America My Breath,
with Dedication and appended Histories.

If, in the series, I seem to have written as
a pillager, putting my New World to work for
me, I have done so as a person who found
there, for all its faults, a great nation,
and a sense of freedom and the remarkable.
I hope American friends will accept my
examination of their epic history. I have
used it as a warning image of what can be
lost, like breath.

Get more here:
Here's David

http://www.ipoz.biz/titles/pa.htm


Poem by David:

AMERICA MY BREATH

1. New Light on Spoons

In mesa saloons
I see the blue moons
spoons dissolve.
Somewhere new light
puts out the prairie
and the lantern and a bear
goes home in the night:


the thorax of pillage,
the man in the moonwalk
on the village:
an engine at large
swallowing at random
what atoms bury.


In the light before
that outlaws speech,
joined with the dumb
we stand by gallows,
we are gallows-ripe;
what then swallows
up earth in the air?
We are the end of the rope.


Meanwhile lilacs
in the dooryard bloom
for logs of war
as large as bear,
dogwood in Shiloh,
Savannah sad willow,
at Gettysburg, stones;


and, for the unknown tomb,
the eternal flame
in contorted spoons.

More poems about Aussie turning American:

http://www.qct.com.au/rowbotham/pacific.html


Good luck