Poetry: “We Are Not Americans” by Terence Cannon
Poet Terence Cannon
We Are Not Americans
By
Terence Cannon
Terence Cannon writes . . .
“I wrote this poem in a time of despair, when the wide movement of the Sixties seemed to be crumbling under faults from within and attacks from without. The poem was and is meant to be hopeful. I called for unity within and devotion to an extended struggle without. Our 1969 was France’s ’69 and today’s Occupy and Egypt’s Arab Spring. Every movement rolls and expands into another. The poem calls for patience and vision over decades. Its bombs and fuses are metaphorical: they say we cannot import a revolution. Only in the rear view mirror, as we blow past despair, can we know we did create and are creating revolutions, just not the ones we imagined at the times.”
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