A poem, for the Fourth of July
PATRIA by Keith Boynton
You do not love her less when her skirts are torn,
Her standard bloody, dragging in the mud,
Her ankles fettered, chafed, her eyes cast down,
Her ghoulish captors dancing her defeat;
This is the time, instead, to love her more,
With all the fervency of desperate hope,
Which sees, beyond the black horizon, fire
That may be battle, or the burst of dawn.