POETRY

Shadowed Anthems

America—captured in haikus and imagery

Photo by Ian MacDonald on Unsplash

This 4th of July arrived with a complicated, heavy resonance. Like many Americans, I found myself trying to make sense of a deeply conflicted emotional landscape. I have profound gratitude for the freedoms, the history, and the visceral beauty of the United States, a place that, on most days, I feel proud to call home.

Yet, there is a sharp, persistent undercurrent of embarrassment and grief over the current actions and rhetoric emanating from our highest office. So much so that when I travel, I only use my Italian passport to avoid any lurking anti-Americanism.

Faced with this fracture between my foundational ideals and this current, crazy reality, I find/found myself asking a fundamental creative question:

How do I express this messy dissonance?

How do I hold space for both patriotism and protest, for appreciation and painful disappointment?

The answer, for me, required turning off the modern political machine and focusing instead on the raw, honest fragments of the American experience.

American Haikus in Images is the result of this interrogation.

The haiku forces a deliberate restraint — seventeen syllables to capture a singular, unvarnished truth. When placed alongside visual landscapes, like the Statue of Liberty obscured and suspended in a heavy fog, these micro-poems become a mirror for our current cultural moment.

This project is not an abandonment of the American experiment; rather, it is an act of devotion through critique. It is a way to look directly into the fog, to mourn the promises we used to keep, and to insist on remembering the dreams we are still meant to chase.

i.

All original haikus added to Bing images.

ii.

iii.

iv.

v.

vi.

vii.

viii.

ix.

x.

[embed]Custom Video Landing Page Edit descriptionvideo214.com

Thank you for indulging me.

[embed]Cappelli, MFA, JD, PhD - Medium Read writing from Cappelli, MFA, JD, PhD on Medium. A writer with too many degrees, who writes her own crap.medium.com