{"sf1_id":1864546,"sf2_id":"rm8drDm0","title":"Blank Verse Essay on the Haunting of America","author":"Rob MacWolf","words":600,"posted_at":"2022-06-16T20:32:00.000Z","tags":["Blank verse essay","Iambic pentameter","Poetry","blank verse"],"url":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/1864546-blank-verse-essay-on-the-haunting-of-america","original_url":"https://sofurry.com/s/rm8drDm0","image_url":"https://cdn.sofurryfiles.com/submissions/thumbnails/c8/73/c873013e-c998-4c49-979d-d13785d136e4","description":"#52 of poetry\n\nPut this together from a bunch of other points I had. It's surprising how smooth blank verse essay, as a form, makes doing that.\nI don't really know what more I could add here. It's not much of an essay if it isn't self-explanatory.","content":"If you tell stories long enough my friend,\n\nI think, if you are honest, you must own\n\nThat stories told here, told about here, try\n\nTo turn into ghost stories. Only by\n\nSupreme and rigid force of will can you\n\nTell any story in this land of ours\n\nAnd not discover, if you let it last,\n\nA ghost or two within it, before long.\n\n  \n\nI do not mean, of course, merely the most\n\nAnd obvious ghost stories. For indeed,\n\nAmerica has more than its fair share\n\nOf phantom hitchhikers, of wailing shades,\n\nOf unglimpsed hands of children neath the bridge,\n\nThe hook left dangling from the hot rod door.\n\nThe raw head and bloody bones, that howl\n\nSomewhere out in the forest wilderness.\n\nThe creature at the bottom of the bed  \nAccusing you about its missing tail.\n\nThe riders in the storm torn-desert sky.\n\nThe spectres at the crossroads. The lovelorn\n\nAnd pining rapping at the chamber door\n\nWhich, opened flung, reveals nobody there:\n\nJust wind among the trees, just blackbirds on\n\nThe lintel, just the anchors on our wrists.\n\n  \n\nBut any honest soul must also ask:\n\nHow many bones are our houses built on?\n\nThe huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.\n\nSome dead of hunger, some of overwork\n\nWearied of life, and weary still in death.\n\nThe worker and the slave, the refugee,\n\nThose turned away from begging at the door.\n\nThe soldiers killed in every useless war\n\nAnd those they killed in uselessness as well.\n\nOur safety laws are written in the blood\n\nOf those they were not written yet to save.\n\nMy people, of the many colored flame,\n\nHave all the liberties that we have found\n\n(Which yet are not so many) at the end\n\nOf death march down the long brick-quilted road.\n\nAnd underneath, how many hundred years\n\nOf peoples, of whom many have not heard\n\nOn stolen land. Which aye, is all of it.\n\nYou cannot live a day, nay not an hour,\n\nOn land they claim was made for you and me\n\nWith having to wade across a flood\n\nOf business, all unfinished, left by some\n\nOld, pale, rich, heedless heir who, if he lived,\n\nWould never stoop to speak to one of us.\n\nThe consequences of their lives unkempt,\n\nThe fallout of their choices unresolved.\n\nEach day, you lay your hand on something that\n\nIs both the remnant of somebody's life,\n\nAnd could not come to be without their death.\n\nLook close, with honest eyes, and you will see\n\nThe ghosts in whatsoever story's told.\n\nWe all are living in a ghost story.\n\nYour house is haunted, and has always been.\n\nAnd even as the universe runs down,\n\nThe stars burn out, and heat and time themselves\n\nGrind to a halt. With humankind long dead\n\nSo that concepts of 'Marriage,' 'September,'\n\nand 'Five' mean nothing: no one, now, is there\n\nTo whom they could mean aught. Still nonetheless\n\nIt will forevermore remain the truth:\n\nSeptember fifth was once my wedding day,\n\nNot time nor omnipotence can undo\n\nIn Saecula Saeculorum, Amen.\n\n  \n\nThe universe is meaningless until  \nWe break its silence. Whatever we shout,\n\nThe echoes of it spread forevermore\n\nOur stories like the ripples in a pond.\n\n  \n\n...and what else is a soul, if tis not that?\n\nAnd what else is a ghost? And aye what else\n\nIs immortality? My story too\n\nWill someday be a ghost story, and I\n\nThe ghost that tells it. You that read these lines\n\nKnow this: Et in Arcadia Eris.\n\nYou feel the chill, a-creeping down your spine?\n\nThis house is haunted, and the ghost is mine.\n\n  \n  \n\n","series":{"name":"poetry","previous":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/1851922-the-homecoming-of-daniel-usherswell.json","next":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/1883321-introduction-to-the-lone-and-level-sands-stretch-far-away.json"}}