Finding America

- with much thanks to the History Channel -

My immigrant ancestry goes back

to Banbury’s cross, ornate

and celebrated in rhyme, a pilgrimage, too,

and torn down by the faithful,

the righteous, the Pure, protesting,

purifying their lives and God

to fit themselves, Bible-based,

a strict and uncompromising people

becoming bullies, intolerant in the new world

to which they came, this Promised Land

of rightful worship, religious freedom,

England’s colony, left to destroy themselves.

And die out they did, leaving behind them

who we have become, their legacy

in this much different world and time,

modern America, self-reliant and, politically,

bent to localism, Americanism at its finest,

carrying us into the 20^th century,

the new millennium, the Promised Land

of modern man, rapid change, progress,

global war and science, travel

in a shrinking world that melds us

into one people even as we fight against it,

against the loss of self in an all-inclusive community,

shared power and the commerce thereof,

one lost among the many more, changing fast.

Yet fear accompanies that loss,

accompanies that change and the ease of life created,

a change too troublesome, leaving us behind, and afraid.

But our roots grow deep, back to Banbury’s cross

and the faithful, the righteous, the Pure

who left, our immigrant roots defining us

who opposed England’s church and rule and fleeing,

finding “in the free air of the New World”

themselves and us and a way of life,

self-reliance and self-rule, finding America,

scrutinizing ourselves by the stirrings

of our grace acknowledged and our divinely sanctioned

energies of a soul put to use, benevolent

and violently destructive, to return

to who we were and what we’ve become now

in a modern world that threatens us,

threatens our identities as a free people.