Chapter endings in This America by Jill Lepore

I didn’t pick up Jill Lepore’s This America to study its chapter endings. But there it was on a nonfiction display shelf in my local library, looking invitingly slender. I loved These Truths, and I was in complaining mode about the state of the world, so I reached for it.

It’s a quick read but that’s not my point. Something else caught my eye and invited me to read it in an entirely different way.

Place the last lines of all sixteen chapters together and there’s something else here. A found poem of sorts.

And I apologize, Jill Lepore, but I pared away words and punctuation marks here and there, added line breaks hither and yon, and, I must confess, shunted a few lines out of order. I know, I know and if you truly want me to take this down, I will write it out for myself and disappear it from the public gaze.

But I needed the mental breathing exercise of juggling your wonderful words. And now your little book (which I did read, I promise, more than just the chapter endings) is making me feel I can keep on keeping on.

This Requires Making the Case for the Nation

not as a nation-state but instead as something stranger,
a state-nation, a thing as rare as hens' teeth.
a liberal nation to which anyone who affirms its civic ideals belongs
often wrong but so long as protest is possible, it can always be righted.

the American charter was torn to fragments
but they're still there, traditions waiting to be claimed,
challenges waiting to be met
The United States would all but shut its doors
but you can also pick poppies for flowers,
and make them into memorials for fallen soldiers

By then, another reign of terror had begun
A new seed would have to be sown

They call themselves "nationalists"
their history will be a fiction
they will say that they alone love this country.
They will be wrong.

Winter always comes. But invariably, then comes spring.