Ada Limon | "A New National Anthem"
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In this week's episode of the Get Lit Minute, your weekly poetry podcast, we spotlight the life and work of poet, Ada Lim\\xf3n.\\xa0 She is the author of five poetry collections, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her fourth book Bright Dead Things was named a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Source
This episode includes a reading of an excerpt from her poem,\\xa0 "A New National Anthem". See more work by Ada Lim\\xf3n featured in our 2021 Get Lit Anthology.
"A New National Anthem"
The truth is, I\\u2019ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it\\u2019s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with \\u201cthe rockets
red glare\\u201d and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always, there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn\\u2019t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions \\u201cno refuge
could save the hireling and the slave\\u201d? Perhaps,
the truth is, every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don\\u2019t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it\\u2019s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it\\u2019s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it\\u2019s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that\\u2019s our birthright,
that\\u2019s sung in silence when it\\u2019s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone\\u2019s rough fingers weaving
into another\\u2019s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn\\u2019t that enough?