Idea for Poem

So last week I was attending a soccer game, it was an evening game, and it had been raining for several days, nothing heavy, but a constant sprinkling. The sky was overcast and gloomy, it was a thin drizzle, the world slick and slippery. So as the athletes took the center of the field and the national anthem was played, we all gazed at an empty flagpole. It was almost too much: everyone standing, some singing, some saluting, and we are all staring out across the field at an absence, a lack, an emptiness. It was a postmodern performance--we all imagined the flag there, and we all slavishly honored what we knew was not there.

The anthem was a recording of the school band, and it was a lackluster performance--the bass drum murderously off beat, as was the sousaphone, and so it seemed more like an early practice session of the middle school band. Comic and just bad enough to be awful.

The players on the home team seemed abjectly disinterested--stretching their legs, looking down at the grass, spitting, talking.

At the moment I thought of our troops in Iraq, how they are putting their lives on the line across the globe so that we do not need to sacrifice or suffer, and I thought of all of the blistering close-minded rhetoric that challenges the patriotism of those who question our country's mission in the middle east.

[On the first anniversary of Katrina President Bush was asked in a televised interview why he had not asked Americans to sacrifice as we fight in Iraq. He answered that Americans have suffered and sacrificed. They pay higher prices, they had their lives interrupted, the economy suffered, energy prices have soarde. That is a strange kind of sacrifice or suffering.]

i thought of the arrogance we all at that moment held collectively: the right, the privilege, to enjoy a soccer game, to compete and hope to win, in a game of relatively no importance and yet many of the people at this game deeply cared about its results, far more than they cared about what their country was doing in Iraq.

We seeem to be distracted. We seem to be duped into see something that is not there.

The excuse offered later in the game was that the flag was not flown during drizzly days.

So we must save the flag from fire and water? We must watch what we say and think because our questions and convictions suggest that we have gotten ourselves into trouble by naively entering the business if nation-building, by blinding ourselves from our desire to hope that other countries with complex histories will suddenlu drop their stories and somehow embrace democracy?