instead of poems about experiences I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they ref… - Adrienne Rich

What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other's despair into hope?--
You yourself must change it.--
what would it feel like to know
your country was changing?--
You yourself must change it.--
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?

The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.

At times in the past decade and a half I have felt like a stranger in my own country. I seem not to speak the official language. I believe many others feel like this, not just as poets or intellectuals but as citizens-accountable yet excluded from power. I began as an American optimist, albeit a critical one, formed by our racial legacy and by the Vietnam War. In both these cases it was necessary to look hard truths in the face in order to change horrible realities. I believed, with many others, that my country's historical aquifers were flowing in that direction of democratic change. I became an American skeptic, not as to the long search for justice and dignity, which is part of all human history, but in the light of my nation's leading role in demoralizing and destabilizing that search, here at home and around the world. Perhaps just such a passionate skepticism, neither cynical nor nihilistic, is the ground for continuing.