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FURTHER READING
Politics and Patriotism
Howl, Parts I & II
by Allen Ginsberg
America
by James Monroe Whitfield
America
by Claude McKay
America
by Robert Creeley
American History
by Michael S. Harper
American Names
by Stephen Vincent Benét
Bomb Crater Sky
by Lam Thi My Da
Children of Our Era
by Wislawa Szymborska
Dear George Bush
by Kristin Prevallet
Delicate Cluster
by Walt Whitman
Election Year
by Donald Revell
Exquisite Candidate
by Denise Duhamel
Exquisite Politics
by Denise Duhamel
Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind
by Carl Sandburg
I, Too, Sing America
by Langston Hughes
Identity Crisis
by F. D. Reeve
In a Country
by Larry Levis
Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes
On the Day of Nixon's Funeral
by Ira Sadoff
Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds
by Eleanor Lerman
Patriotics
by David Baker
Praise Song for the Day
by Elizabeth Alexander
Thanksgiving Letter from Harry
by Carl Dennis
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To Roosevelt  
by Rubén Darío

It is with the voice of the Bible, or verse of Walt Whitman,
that we should reach you, Hunter!
Primitive and modern, simple and complicated,
with a bit of Washington and a bit of Nimrod.
You are the United States,
You are the future invader
the naive America who has Indian blood,
that still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks Spanish.

You are a proud and strong exemplar of your race;
you are cultured, you are clever, you oppose Tolstoy.
And breaking horses, or murdering tigers,
you are an Alejandro Nebuchadnezzar.
(You're a professor of energy,
as today's madmen say.)
You think life is fire,
that progress is eruption;
where you put your bullet
you put the future.

No.

The United States is strong and big.
When it shakes there is a deep tremor
through the enormous vertebrae of the Andes.
If you clamor, you hear the roar of the lion.
Hugo said to Grant: "The stars are yours."
(Just shining, rising, Argentine sun
and the Chilean star rises ...) You're rich.
Join Hercules' cult to Mammon's;
and lighting the path to easy conquest,
Liberty raises her torch in New York.

But our America, which had poets
from the old days of Netzahualcoyotl,
you have saved in the footsteps of the great feet of Bacchus
panic in the alphabet learned a while;
who consulted the stars, that knew Atlantis,
whose name comes to resonate in Plato
Since the ancient times of your life
living light, fire, perfume, love,
America's great Montezuma, from the Inca,
redolent of America by Christopher Columbus
Catholic American, Spanish American,
The America where noble Cuahtemoc said:
"I'm not a bed of roses" that America
trembles in hurricanes and lives in Love,
men of Saxon eyes and barbarous soul lives.
And dreams. And loves, and vibrates, and is the daughter of the Sun
Be careful. Live the American Spanish!
There are thousand of puppies loose Leon Spanish.
Be required, Roosevelt, being God himself,
Rifleman the terrible and strong Hunter,
order to keep us in your tight grip.

And, You may count it all, missing one thing: God!



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1903. Translation released into the public domain; translator unknown.
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