THE LAND OF THE FREE AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE

What better way to mark Independence Day today, on the Fourth of July, with a quote from a poem by Armenian American poet Gregory Djanikian (born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1948). He moved to the United States at the age of 8 with his family and lives outside of Philadelphia with his wife, artist Alysa Bennett. “His work explores, among other things, the private and public legacies of family, history, and culture, often through meditations on his own Armenian heritage and childhood emigration to the United States,” says the Poetry Foundation. Poet Stephen Dunn has called him “a gardener of the human spirit” whose poems “replenish” while offering readers “a wonderful variety of tones.” Below is an excerpt from his lengthy poem “Immigrant Picnic”:

It’s the Fourth of July, the flags
are painting the town,
the plastic forks and knives
are laid out like a parade.

And I’m grilling, I’ve got my apron,
I’ve got potato salad, macaroni, relish,
I’ve got a hat shaped
like the state of Pennsylvania.

[…]

That’s not the point I begin telling them,
and I’m comparing words to fish now,
like the ones in the sea at Port Said,
or like birds among the date palms by the Nile,
unrepentantly elusive, wild.