I Hear America Sweltering

after Walt Whitman, on the nation's 250th birthday, July 4, 2026

I hear America sweltering, the varied groans I hear, The capital at a hundred and two on its two hundred fiftieth birthday, Its great parade called off by mid-morning, the flags refolded carefully into their boxes, Philadelphia likewise, and Fairfax, and Takoma Park — the tubas sent home glinting and unblown.

I hear the air conditioners humming their million-windowed chorale, The grid strained like a long note held too long, eight hundred thousand rooms gone quiet and dark, The lineman aloft in his bucket at noon, sweat-anointed, splicing the current back to the people, The conductor announcing gently the twenty-sixth cancelled train, the platforms sighing as one body, The nurse in the cold cathedral of the emergency room, counting the pulses of strangers, The vendor of bottled water on the Mall doing, it must be said, immense and patriotic business.

Each one singing what belongs to them and to no one else: The children shrieking in the fire hydrant's silver applause, The grandmothers on porches with paper fans from funeral homes, The dog flattened like a rug on the coolest tile in the republic, The forecasters, those anxious psalmists, promising relief by Tuesday.

O America, you are two hundred fifty years old and the thermometer says one hundred and two, And still at dusk — for the dusk relents, it has relented for two and a half centuries — You came out anyway, onto blankets, onto tailgates, onto rooftops, Wet-browed, fanning yourself with the program of a parade that never marched.

And the sky went up in fire of the intended kind, And you tipped your head back all at once, every face lit the same color, Sweating, undefeated, singing with your mouth full of ice The same song, the words unchanged: still here, still here, still here.