My Garrison Keillor impression
And now, a poem for today...
Hard Rain
by Tony Hoagland
After I heard It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an
accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping
Mall,
I understood there's nothing
we can't pluck the stinger
from,
nothing we can't turn into a soft drink flavor or a
t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a
commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people
quoting Thoreau
to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has
been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with
electrified alligator barriers.
You can't keep beating yourself up,
Billy
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage
murderer,
About all those people you killed—
You just have to be the
best person you can be,
one day at a time—
and everybody in
the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has
been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is
greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.
Dear
Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from
one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood-
but he
never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say
something?
Signed,
America.
I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could
mind my own business and get along,
but that was just another song
that
had been taught to me since birth—
whose words I was humming under my
breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.
