First Place Winner, May 2002 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

Filed In:

Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, May 2002

WHITMANESQUE
Jerry Jenkins
(Poets.org)

I see America traveling,
the lurching prairie schooners like overcooked hotdogs,
the popeyed oxen, the hot frazzled women,
thin scrawny men with the bugs of the trail in their whiskers
(my pappy and me come west in '36, I was one of seventeen kids...)
I see you tortured in vast summer heat
wearing your Prussian linsey-woolsey,
you pioneers scratching, a sound like a thousand of rasps on crocodile hide.
And here is a dog, with dopey lugubrious eyes,
spotted and indolent, tan and white, baying at random, at nothing.

The long line fades into mud trails, dry in the summer,
cracked and volcanic, dusty and choking the pack trains.
Your oxen transmute to horses, wagons to stagecoaches,
fat wooden churns, wheels splintered on corduroy roads,
lurching and tossing the passengers, (Hang on for dear life!),
advancing to westward, Shakegut Express, filling the air with curses,
loud lamentations, the stage capsizing,
once, twice, a dozen times. How the carpetbags fly!

Out of the east I see your black-armored serpent,
hooting, filling the day with the lather of steam and black smoke.
I have seen torrents of buffalo, consternated,
thundering, waking the prairie dogs, whistle and bellow.
I have been passenger, I have endured your indignities,
putting out fires in the railway car, ash in my eye,
cinders and grit in my face,
I feel America jouncing.

Out of the Spindletop, endlessly rocking,
the ceaseless pumps of the oil wells,
the mindless teeter-totters,
bobbing ducks sucking petroleum.
Their effluent fills these millions of cars,
thick as lice in the concrete seams of the highways,
maddened, thronging the shrinking roadnet,
the hot harried women, career mamas,
salesmen, nattering witlessly into their car-phones,
gibberish filling the bandwidth,
and quietly in someone's suburban garage,
the larval concept of the personal helicopter,
hatching, waiting to breed,
waiting for Everyman,
waiting for Everyman's skies.
I shudder.
America travels.

Judge Sheila Bender's comment: “I love Whitman and I love Ginsberg, who loved Whitman, and I love this poem for its artful updating of Whitman and Ginsberg on America and for its bright use of Whitman's rhetorical patterns to generate great energy!”