Fourth of July
You held the fire in your hands.
You watched the embers burn, held the memories in your hands, held the silences, their emptiness.
You were braiding the sky with flame. You were listening for the cry.
Time was a hunger swallowing despair, desperation, and always the strange colonies of cloud overhead, time speaking in tongues.
You were driving right into the storm.
You were asleep at the wheel, or aiming your father’s gun, halting thought with your own blood.
You were childless, you were yourself a child
waiting for the muzzle’s flash and still, for the eternity of light, star in the eyes, for the simple, impossible brilliance and afterimage billowing out
as you were thrust into that secret dark where no one escapes, no one remembers,
where you’ll remain, in the end, frightened and alone,
holding the fire in your hands.
Copyright © 2025 by Rob Arnold. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 11, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem braids together intersecting strands of violence. I wrote the first draft after the Charleston massacre and Black church arsons that preceded the Fourth of July holiday that year [in 2015]. Afterimages of those tragedies haunt the poem alongside the memory of a friend who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound on July 4, 1999. My childhood was also marked by my father’s guns [which] my brother would chase me with, playing at murder. The pantomimed warfare of Independence Day—also my first aesthetic experience, as beautiful as it was dreadful—felt like an appropriate backdrop to bring these terrors into conversation.”
—Rob Arnold
Rob Arnold
Rob Arnold is a CHamoru poet and the author of To the Unnamed (Graywolf, 2027). He is the recipient of fellowships from Artist Trust, Somerville Arts Council, Jack Straw Cultural Center, and T. S. Eliot House. Arnold lives in Brooklyn, New York, also known as Lenapehoking.