O Say Can You See

by Henry Lyman
Jul 02, 2021 | Filed in Articles & Opinion

While fireworks over county fairgrounds hover,

as rockets whistling bang and everybody cheers,     

 

fireflies miles away spangle a hillside field

with secret slowly moving silent little stars.

 

Statelessly floating as on some unseen river,

floating just above the ground and spinning as

 

the cries grow dimmer, what bigger, better banner                                

could a world ever wave than this tiny anthem?

 

— Henry Lyman

Henry Lyman

Henry Lyman’s poetry collection The Land Has Its Say was published by Open Field Press in 2015. For some twenty years he hosted and produced Poems to a Listener, a nationally distributed radio series of readings and conversation with poets (www.poemstoalistener.org).

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