No One Told Us - The American Experience
Posted by Anne McCrady
Every year as June begins, I am returned to the joy of being ten or twelve with a whole summer ahead. Those days in the mid sixties were a hot, humid heaven!
Already there were forces at work inside me as I took part in the American experience. A science nerd, a Southerner, a white female, an upper middle class Christian, I saw the world as safe and just with unlimited potential, and I wanted that for everyone (especially the unconverted people we had never seen in China and Africa and Russia).
But there were things to come we could not foresee.
Some came sooner, others later. It is worth thinking about what we did not know then. In doing that, this poem sprung up. I hope you find some parallel in your own coming of age. If so, let me know!
While we were naive, we were also creative. While we were lucky, we were also generous. My daily hope is that we can find a way to again be like optimistic, energetic, open-hearted children. The world needs that!
Here’s the poem:
No One Told Us
As kids, we chased the future downhill
on tassled bikes that clickety-clicked
with red Bicycle playing cards
clothes-pinned to the whirring
spokes, drove them hard
and fast as race cars.
On scratchy black-and-white
console television screens,
while we shook and salted Jiffy Pop,
we watched rocket science
rise from the launch pad
to leave the gravity of our globe.
In striped T-shirts and Keds,
we learned hard words like race
and power and prejudice
in schools where our teachers taught
us that grown-up girls could be more
than managers or mamas or maids.
With Koolaid smiles and sticky hands,
we welcomed our daddies home
after long days of honest American work,
then we welcomed our neighbor’s sons
in fatigues and wheelchairs
home from the war we couldn’t win.
But, I swear, no one told us
our speed could kill the planet.
We did not know women
would still have to wait their turn.
And no one warned us
that one day rockets would take us
somewhere besides the moon
and that a man who had no sons
would drag the rest of the world to war.
With What We Know Now,
We Can Be A Blessing!
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June 25th, 2007 at 9:35 am
[…] Though that writing class was years ago, it is an exercise I have repeated several times on my own since then: looking back to a time in my past to write a poem about “what I know now that I didn’t know then.” You can see one of those poems on a previous post, No One Told Us. […]