There are three basic themes to manifest destiny:

The special virtues of the American people and their institutions
The mission of the United States to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America
An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty

Historian Frederick Merk says this concept was born out of “a sense of mission to redeem the Old World by high example … generated by the potentialities of a new earth for building a new heaven.” –

– from a Wikipedia article on Manifest Destiny

On a Tuesday.

A Tuesday.

A day so normal it couldn’t bother
to be symbolic. So not 
a weekend, so not a week’s 
beginning. A Tuesday. 

That is when it happened.
That is when we began to fall
for the last time. 

It was in every way inevitable
that we would at some point
stagger into history
feeble and angry, our shaking hands 
holding our most ancient swords 
to each other’s throats, but
because we did not call ourselves 
an empire,
we forgot how they have all ended
and so we missed it when that ending
started on a Tuesday. 

Which Tuesday? Which date?
No telling. Truly,
no one is certain and no one
is talking. The date doesn’t matter, 
the weather that day doesn’t matter,
the stars lie about everything
so why the date should matter
is unclear:

just say 
it must have happened
on a Tuesday,
the day built for 
anticlimax.