Heartland Poem by Whit Leyenberger

My American heritage is umbilical chords
running along the telephone lines to every unfilled town.
It’s a chronic severance, a phantom yearning for unity last held
when her great rambling body was carved for fifty clean portions
It’s the desire to return to a thousand lost homes at once

send me home to where bayou philosophers
watch storms roll in off the gulf
send me home to the rockytop philistines scavenging a paradise
send me home to where they struggle for hunger
amid corrosive plenty
send me home to where lovers lie on mausoleums:
pioneers on the cusp of an awful bliss
send me home to where they know the worth of a cheap beer
of ketchup and baseball
of good friends and bad decisions
of those that fought before us and those doomed to inherit

bury my heart in Topeka
make mounds for my kidneys in Sarasota and Minneapolis
hide my nose on the lower east side
so it will always soak up the sunshine curry smells
from deep inside a jewess’ flowerbox
ship my liver off to Lynchburg, send her home boys.
Grant my lungs an eternity in savannah, patience and easy smiles
dropp my feet on the road somewhere
leave them on one of those great red veins slicing across our cartography
give my knuckles to Philly, only they’d know what to do with them.
Pour my blood into the Allegheny, the Mississippi, the Rio Grande
return me to the only land that could give me such eyes

anywhere starving on the pride of feral independence
anywhere that hearts can sing their fears to a full starred sky
where God isn’t caught within steeples, where nerves will never dry rot
this is my homeland
and I love her like a man with too many children
I’m homesick for an America that festers in stunted wings
America the beautiful: send me home