| Dependence Day By John Daniel |
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| It would be a quieter holiday, no fireworks or loud parades, no speeches, no salutes to any flag, a day of staying home instead of crowding away, a day we celebrate nothing gained in war but what we’re given—how the sun’s warmth is democratic, touching everyone, and the rain is democratic too, how the strongest branches in the wind give themselves as they resist, resist and give themselves, how birds could have no freedom without the planet’s weight to wing against, how Earth itself could come to be only when a whirling cloud of dust pledged allegiance as a world circling dependently around a star, and the star blossomed into fire from the ash of other stars, and once, at the dark zero of our time, a blaze of revolutionary light exploded out of nowhere, out of nothing, because nothing needed the light, as the brilliance of the light itself needs nothing. |
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[thanks to the Poetry Foundation]