Skies, I see the skies and they travel forever and a day. Lakes run through the fields discovering creeks that run through our lives.

I have seen America, I have witnessed the simplicity of farm life being enough for one and all. I have heard America, I have heard the talk of food prices and the peace of worrying about nothing.

I have felt America, I have felt the soil between my fingers, the dew from the morning between my toes. I sat and watched the creation in their hushed reverie of all that was created around them.

I have seen America, I have traveled around and through her seeing her best and the rotten core of her worst. I am America, I am the embodiment of all that was at odds but is now unified under the banner of equality. I know America, I know the thirst for violence that courses through her veins despite her best efforts. I shame America, her bloodlust, her contempt for the poor and steadfast who live unnoticed, thankless quiet lives. I entered America, I moved through her heart destined to find solace in her complex simplicity. I desire America, I desire all that she should be but isn't. I desire her righteousness that has been sacrificed for self-righteousness. I desire her bed of ferns beneath her piles of money.

I have lost America, I have lost her to her greed and war-mongering. I have lost her to a city of ruin and desolation, caved in by floods and left by her government to waste away. I have lost America, lost her to political ideal instead of human ideal. I have lost her to her own reflection. But this America, this fragility, this inhospitality, this young child, she is but a babe in crib, a whale in her sea of her disallusionment.

But in this America, this land, this earth, this violence, I found peace.

J.M. Prater