Aimee Pozorski
Opening Day in New Britain
Lined up on home plate, we watch
a girl from the New Britain High Madrigals
prepare to sing our Anthem.
I will not cry.
I have given up on displays of American patriotism
a long time ago.
The newest members of New Britain Little League
are the smallest:
five year old boys—and some brave girls—
wearing the jerseys and caps of their sponsors.
On Eliot’s cap, a pawnshop logo.
Red, black, brown, yellow, white—their shirts reflect the colors of
their faces. They have come from
everywhere to live in this town, to stand here now,
to play our sport.
The mayor is here, and the commissioner
and Tebucky Jones, former NFL player and New Britain
man who gives back to his hometown. “Don’t let people tell you
you won’t amount to anything because of where you live,” he says.
They nod and smile, squinting in the sun, squirming in their shoes, some a little bored, drawing pictures in the sand.
After the speeches, the boys take off their hats,
and put them on their chests, like Tebucky Jones, like their dads.
I will not cry, I say,
as they bring out the microphone, and raise the flag.
But then the girl begins, her voice clear as a bell, clear as this day in May.
“Oh say can you see?”
And I do see,
and I do cry,
and I hate myself.
Tony Kushner gives the best lines in Angels in America to Belize,
and I can hear them now, louder than the singing voice floating above the park:
The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing.
He set the word “free” to a note so high nobody can reach it.
Are we free, here, on Opening Day in New Britain?
Some of us are more free than others.
Yet, here are these children lined up before us in a little parade:
the Angels,
the Dodgers,
the Cubs,
the Braves
These young boys—and some brave girls.
Hands and caps over their hearts
they sing the star spangled banner with mouths open and eyes shut.
They know what Ralph Ellison had also known:
we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built
and not the men,
or at least
not the men who did
the violence.
That we must not reject our country on opening day—
that the principles of freedom and justice are bigger than all of us,
and, also, more true.
These little players standing on home plate know it all somehow
with a force that links them as they sway together—dozens of them—
in time to the voice
on the pitcher’s mound.