Jeremiah Dickson was a true-blue American, <br />For he was a little boy who understood America, for he felt that he must <br />Think about everything; because that’s all there is to think about, <br />Knowing immediately the intimacy of truth and comedy, <br />Knowing intuitively how a sense of humor was a necessity <br />For one and for all who live in America. Thus, natively, and <br />Naturally when on an April Sunday in an ice cream parlor Jeremiah <br />Was requested to choose between a chocolate sundae and a banana split <br />He answered unhesitatingly, having no need to think of it <br />Being a true-blue American, determined to continue as he began: <br />Rejecting the either-or of Kierkegaard, and many another European; <br />Refusing to accept alternatives, refusing to believe the choice of between; <br />Rejecting selection; denying dilemma; electing absolute affirmation: knowing <br />in his breast <br />The infinite and the gold <br />Of the endless frontier, the deathless West. <br /> <br /> <br />“Both: I will have them both!” declared this true-blue American <br />In Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an April Sunday, instructed <br />By the great department stores, by the Five-and-Ten, <br />Taught by Christmas, by the circus, by the vulgarity and grandeur of <br />Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, <br />Tutored by the grandeur, vulgarity, and infinite appetite gratified and <br />Shining in the darkness, of the light <br />On Saturdays at the double bills of the moon pictures, <br />The consummation of the advertisements of the imagination of the light <br />Which is as it was—the infinite belief in infinite hope—of Columbus, <br />Barnum, Edison, and Jeremiah Dickson.<br /><br />Delmore Schwartz<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-true-blue-american/
