Do I truly love America? It was a question I had to answer honestly if I was going to write an honest poem. I began thinking of my relationship with America and how it had evolved through different phases, just as my consciousness of love had evolved, especially with my partner, Mark. I saw parallels between a loving human relationship and the love we hold for our country. This was the genesis of the first poem, “What We Know of Country,” which begins as young love begins, with a certain childlike innocence, the perception of the beloved—of country—as flawless. For me, that meant believing the fairy-tale version of Thanksgiving with the much-too-kind-hearted Pilgrims and their gold-buckled shoes, an obsession of mine since childhood, and recalling my fascination with “My country ’tis of thee” and the national anthem, thinking it addressed Latinos like us in the opening line: “O, José can you see . . .”
That innocence eventually expanded into a broader sense of nationality and community, a feeling of belonging to something larger, just as when love evolves from the I to the we and so forth through various stages of understanding, until the romantic illusions I had held about our country ruptured and I faced the historical truths, no longer looking at America through red-white-and-blue-colored lenses. But eventually, as with a relationship, there came a time to forgive and accept that neither love nor country is perfect. Through the process of writing “What We Know of Country,” I discovered that yes, I truly loved America, but not with a blind love or blind patriotism. Rather, with a love that’s much like loving another person, a love that demands effort, asks us to give and take and forgive and constantly examine promises spoken and unspoken.