Independence

There has been
a bit of a break in the wall.

More like a fissure,
a thin crack.

Something’s
leaking out of it.

It isn’t blood. Not water
or oil or sewage,

those classic fluids
usually found at disaster sites.

It may not even be a 
liquid in spite of

those spreading stains
around the crack

which now seems to be
opening wider and perhaps

that’s a sound coming from it,
a sustained howling or maybe

someone’s idea of a song. Nothing
I recognize from my long memory

of this holiday or all the years
around it.

Something is getting out
that’s been walled up for years.

Maybe something we knew was there,
but which used to operate

from the relative cover of the wall
that’s now cracking.  Something

we knew was there but tried
to forget and now there’s a crack

and it’s getting out and we
preferred it when we could pretend

it wasn’t back there at all. Maybe
the fireworks finally 

shook it loose. Maybe we shouldn’t
have been so quick and lax about

setting so many small fires and laughing
at the explosions which followed.  Maybe

we leaned on the wall for support
too hard and too long.