I'm Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

Independence Day is here, cookouts, parades, flag waving, fireworks.

As a kid, July 4th was an excursion of exquisite sight dishes and grilled burgers, hot dogs, and bruts.

Alongside odds, uncles, and cousins, I ran with my way down paper plate of food to games of horseshoe, volleyball, tag, and if at a beach, Marco Polo.

Just when I was about to collapse from overstimulation and exhaustion, evening arrived with the light show in the sky.

The holiday reminds me of the place of America in poetry.

Some poets treat America like a personified lover who hasn't come home in a few days, who could do better.

All bluesed out, they write poems in the form of pleading letters.

Arya Abur, Croons, America, the footsteps of your ghosts are white stones waiting my center.

A subgenre in its own right, such poems simultaneously celebrate possibility, but also bemoan.

It's not betrayal or faithlessness.

Instead, they express a desire to see the country truly evolve into the city on a hill.

Alan Ginsberg asks, America, when will you be angelic?

They seem to ask, to borrow the immortal words of so singer, Martha Franklin, America, when are you going to be a do-right nation?

I find these poems moving. They never let go of the possibility of a true democracy.

The sheer commitment and belief in America, born out of the spirit of critique, is a loving gesture of allegiance and patriotism.

They are the literary equivalent of those who put body to cause with picket signs, who march for equality and justice.

These poems enact a civic duty and call up language in their plea for the country to live up to its stated values.

They are as American as it gets.

Today's poem encourages us to do more than celebrate the narrative of our country, to reflect on our sacred inheritance, with its sacred past.

America, I do not call your name without hope, by Dean Raider, after Neruda.

America, I do not call your name without hope, not even when you lay your knife against my throat, or lace my hands behind my back.

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