July 4: Fourth of July, Land of All the Free, "Waiting for Independence Day Fireworks 2013"

This Fourth of July, one of the things I celebrate is diversity.  The United States was built on diversity.  (It was also built of slavery and racism and a lot of other -isms, but let's not get into that right now.)

This afternoon, I think of all the people in my life--the men, women, children.  Some of them gay.  Some of them straight.  Some of them Muslim and Christian and Jewish.  Last July 4th, I had an afternoon barbecue at a friend's apartment who is Cuban-American.

All of these people I love remind me of what is so great about the country in which I was born.

They also remind Saint Marty that there is a whole lot of work that still needs to be done to make this country the land of all the free again.

Waiting for Independence Day Fireworks 2013

by:  Martin Achatz

On this July 4, 
a girl with pink hair
wrestles a pit bull
in the grass as Black Pearl
plays "Stand by Me"
on the bandstand.
The sky touches the ground
with a wide palm
of sun, day clinging
to these last suckling moments,
nursing dusk's green milk.
So much skin and tattoo around,
flesh against flesh.
I smell coconut
from a flock of teenage
girls who whisper and giggle by,
Budweiser and Marlboros
from the boys close behind them.
An old man and woman sit
in lawn chairs to my left,
eat bratwurst, watch
kids loft Frisbees into the darkening
air. When she's down
to her last bite, the old woman
reaches over, feeds it
to the old man, who accepts it,
kisses her fingertips, his lips
smeared with mustard.
Two men appear.
One carries a blanket.
Their hands almost touch
as they walk together.
They spread their blanket
on the ground, the way
my mom and dad
used to spread towels
on the beach in August,
without need for word
or direction, an easy ballet
of arm and hand, crouch,
kneel, an act they'd repeated
so many times it gleamed
like a rock in lake shallows,
polished for years by tides, waves.
Everyone pauses as the men
sit close to each other,
gray heads like twin dandelions
sprouting from a single weed.
They talk, laugh, drink beer
from brown, long-necked bottles.
Soon, everyone forgets
to be shocked
as night overtakes us,
makes us all the same,
one crowd, indivisible,
under stars and moon,
our bodies primed
for the freedom to love
the sky any way we want.