We're Rich!

an inventory

Old drawing of mine from when I used my finger and the trackpad on my 12-pound navy blue laptop to draw cartoons for my What to Wear This Very Second blog.

This is Emily Writes Back, a newsletter for brilliant people, by Emily Sanders Hopkins.

Dear Reader,

On a walk this morning we passed a driveway in which the parked car featured a bumpersticker that read, “Tax the ultra-rich.” Marshall and I laughed all the rest of the way home, imagining what had inspired it. “Tax the rich” was starting to hit a little too close to home for someone, I guess. But I sympathize with the sentiment. We might be rich?

The below poem, which I wrote for you today, is a teeny bit fake (because is it hopeful or wishful? Uplifting or desultory?) These things should ideally be worked out ahead of publication.

America: Still Rich

All these shiny cars, all this medicine,
fat-cheeked babies everywhere.

We're strolling into elementary schools to vote,
slipping slim computers into sleeves,

jogging into gyms to jump on boxes
and do deadlifts and thrusters just for fun.

Plus half of us are smart, and some of us still laugh.
Many have no time at all for the villainy of ghouls. 

9,028 public libraries, shelves tight with books,
238 billion trees left and ponds galore.

Trophies and pictures of smiling us,
basements full of extra stuff.

We all have 3,000 fourth cousins twice removed--
our family trees could reach the moon.

All these taxes flowing right back to the Sea of Us, 
billions (except when intercepted).

We are, on average or as a whole, languid
and lying on our side in a grove of fruited trees 

like Keats's Autumn, well-clothed, well-moisturized Ethiopian
Anglo, Southeast Asian, great great sons of slaves

making vision boards, cooking soup, 
giving Eskimo kisses, watching reels, jumping rope,

while children who can read 
tumble with rescued dogs on well-mowed lawns

misted misted misted by sprinklers moving back and forth
like magic: circuitry, electricity, clean water,

and in the sky a blood moon was eclipsed today
by our planet's only shadow.