On This Day 189 Years Ago Thomas Jefferson Died . . .

Christal Rice Cooper

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Guest Blogger FREEMAN NG

http://www.authorfreeman.com

A Poem Celebrating July The 4^th

& In Memoriam of Thomas Jefferson

April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826

Jefferson

He returned, whose name never was attached

to any legend of the great leader not dead

but clenched still in some time defying

dream of his people, some Blessed Isle, some

sloping underground kingdom: his people

too young perhaps or plain-minded, or unable

to imagine ever coming to a last

greatest need. Came to where I camped

in a cleft of the thrusting Rockies he can’t

have known the like of, walking simply

into the clear, not a lost traveler, not

a messenger, just another hiker, in his linen

silver-buttoned waistcoat, heavy breeches,

sturdy laced boots: good enough wear

for a walk in the country, but without

an overcoat or pack. Sitting, at my gesture,

by the fire with a grunt of content. Asking

how stood the Republic.

                                                  I began

with the corporations and the mass

of hoarded wealth so concentrated as to warp

the geometries of our shared plane, but he

was not surprised. Joint stock companies, charters

granted willy nilly; he should have warned

with greater vehemence. I pressed him

with images of child labor, sweatshop workforces

like the populations of entire colonial towns,

but he saw only the germ of enlightened

democratic Revolution in the service

of such a weight of self interest. I told

the rise of the Vote and the Union, and their

decline into present irrelevance. He uttered

ejaculations — no other word than the one

he would have used – of astonished praise

at the former, and for the latter, dispensed

encouragement. What once was built, he said,

could be repaired or reconstructed. (Mind

of the eighteenth century inventor.)

                                                            I turned

to terror, our incessant infamies, and then

he did blanch (only, perhaps, in aristocratic

delicacy) at the rapes and killings, the burnings

of whole cities in a night. Yet, he knew

of cruelties, too, private, familial: he could

extrapolate and so continue nodding

in understanding, nothing yet that might

deter his foolish optimism. I tried

once more: crime and the prisons, which led

inevitably to poverty and race, and there

he became so still and silent, fading

from sight in the sudden dusk, it seemed

time had caught his fugitive soul at last,

pulling him back into the grave

of his completed life. But he remained,

palpable enough to sample the food I offered,

no longer cheerful, no longer fatherly, but

gentle still. The star field he might at last

have found familiar deepened into brilliance.

We crumbled a cigarette into his pipe. The fire

flicked light across our faces, bestowing

an almost imperceptible boon of warmth