Pagies :)

28 März 2011

Joyce Carol Oates: Dreaming America

When the two-lane highway was widened
the animals retreated.
Skunks, raccoons, rabbits - even their small corpses
disappeared from the road- transformed into rags
then into designs
then into stains
then nothing.
 
When the highway was linked to another
then to another
six lanes then nine then twelve rose
sweeping to the horizon
along measured white lines.
The polled Herefords were sold.
When the cornfields were bulldozed
the farmhouses at their edges turned into shanties;
the outbuildings fell.
 
When the fields were paved over
Frisch`s Big Boy rose seventy-five feet in the air.
The Sunoco and Texaco and Gulf signs competed
on hundred-foot stilts
like eyeballs on stalks
white optic-nerves
miraculous.
Illuminated at night.
 
Where the useless stretch of trees lay
an orange sphere like a golf ball
announces the Shopping Mall, open
for Thursday evening shopping.
There, tonight, droves of teenagers hunt
one another, alert on the memorized pavement.
 Where did the country go? - cry the travelers, soaring
past. Where did the country go? - ask the strangers.
The teenager never ask.
Where horses grazed in a dream that had no history,
tonight a thirteen-year-old girl stands dreaming
into the window of Levitz`s Record Shop.
We drive past, in a hurry. We disappear.

We return.

Heute fragte Frau B.: "Lena, warum kann man den 11.9. als "nightmare" für Amerika beschreiben?
Und Lena sagte: Was weiß ich? Das ist schon ein halbes Jahr her, oder nicht? 
Manchmal mache ich mir Sorgen um die Zukunft Deutschlands. Aber ist ja eigentlich auch egal.

Keine Kommentare:

Kommentar veröffentlichen