James Lasdun

The Question

We’re eating outside with our friends,
Woodstock Buddhists; our kids and theirs
are lighting sticks on citronella candles
to throw them at the woods like burning spears;
the Rainbow Family of Living Light
are drumming in Magic Meadow; I’ve drunk enough
that all I want to do is close my eyes,
when a voice rings like a summons from the darkness:
my six-year-old son asking: “Dad,
is America good or bad?”

He’s heard us talking; the litany:
stolen elections, torture memos, wars;
seen the picture of the hooded man
Haj Ali, our oppressor-victim,
arms spread, posed on his box
like Jesus on his mountain
blessing the peacemakers
(but for the dangling wires)
and wants to know whose side he’s on:
his own or someone else’s side against him…

What can I say? That depends
on what rots mean by ”good” or ”bad”
or for that matter “America”,
which might be a fool and his goons
war-gaming in the White House,
but might be, say, the Women in Black
down on the Green with their banner, Bring Our
Troops Back,
or the Rainbow People up in the meadow
drumming in the full moons,
or might just be just us and our friends…?

I think how I moved here;
settled with that long shock of ease
as if in my first lawn chair,
before it could dawn on me
I’d merely exchanged the curse
of being forever elsewhere
for that of the settler – worse,
the children of settlers,
for whom the root of existence
is precisely their fathers’ sins…

He’s waiting for his answer.
I open my mouth to speak
but something stalls me; a strange
heaviness on my tongue
as if after all I’d pledged silence
or struck some nocturnal pact
over whatever act,
doubtful or downright wrong,
secures our presence here,
and I can’t seem to say a damn thing,

and he drifts away, back to his game
of fending off the trees
that look as though they’d marched up the hill
to mass at the edge of our lawn
while we sat here talking,
and a dim shame
clouds in as if there were really something to do
other than drink and chill
and listen to the drums beat
and try to keep our eyes open.