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FREE VERSE POEM​

ROBIN TURNER


AT THE LINDALE, TEXAS POST OFFICE I ASK FOR A BOOK OF STAMPS



He hands me the standard issue American flag variety with its red,
its white, its ever-deepening blue. But I am tired, America, tired
of your shouting flags, this flag, all our flags, every--God help us--
flag flying, flag lowered, flag bullet-holed and half-masted.

I ask if he has anything else, wishing flowers, trees, some soft wash
of watercolor, a woman’s vivid face. “Cowboys,” he answers.
“And cowboy hats.” Slaps them down take-it-or-leave-it
on the counter between us. I leave them. Leave the cowboys.

Leave their stupid John Wayne hats. I take my little book
of shrunken flags and step back outside into a sunlit summer--
its spacious grace, its tiny trembling buds of red, great clouds of white
suspended, scattered across the steadfast blue. Two small shining
​
girls skip past me, trailing their elegant mother, their hair
the color of wrens lifting and falling in the come-and-go wind,
streaming, ribbons of light, waving, waving. My country ‘tis
of thee. I pledge my allegiance.


Robin Turner has recent work in Cider Press Review, The Fourth River, Bracken Magazine, and in the Haunted anthology from Porkbelly Press. A longtime community teaching artist in Dallas, she is currently living in the Pineywoods of rural East Texas for a spell. She works with teen writers online.
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