Work Text:
“I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.”
-Walt Whitman,
‘Song of Myself’ 1855
1787, September
America had never consciously known a world so widely endless as this.
Where though the tumbling valleys and stretching skies remained brilliantly gleaming golds, emeralds, sapphires; every blade of grass, every stone and pebble, gleamed in a manner he did not initially comprehend.
In the mornings when he watched the ocean waves pick at the rocky teeth of New England’s coast, plunged to the ankle, he felt its cold and bitter snap. Upon his skin and through his blood, to his head where his wandering mind would pause in its sleepy reverie and turn, instead, to the horizon.
Wondering.
Pondering.
And then, when in pain he cried at jagged stone piercing the soft webbing between his toes, drawing his feet from the water in a rapid jerk, he saw it.
In the water below the rocks on which he perched, the thinnest rivulets of red warped and blended and became part of the ocean in which it had been shed.
America saw, remembered and understood blood.
That shine, that glitter in his land that had for many fortnights been a haunting, alien presence was at last unveiled.
Named. Known.
He leaped from the rocks and crowed, whooped, hollered, howled, yowled, snarled, laughed and sobbed at the sea. Choked, cried, gasped, wept.
It was Progress that shimmered. It was Freedom framing the trees in faint halos of light.
Four years wondering. As many days since he had been acknowledged by a wounded lion, by the world.
He had lost his father, but he had regained himself. The world was vast- the time to move had come.
America had become America.
Yet as he scoffed at the horizon, made to leave the shoreline, he found himself casting one last glance to the pulsating ocean, the waves that forever broke themselves on hard, hard earth smelling of brine, tea and damp debris.
He hoped that maybe, somehow, as it had two years before, his blood would make it across the divide and touch a distant, gray washed land.
Nine years later-
America watched the ships roll in…
and smiled.