by W.D. Ehrhart
Anyone paying any attention at all to what’s been happening in this country since January 2025 has to be aware of the ongoing and vigorous efforts of our Whitewasher-in-Chief to purge American history of anything that isn’t thoroughly upbeat, positive, and—well, let’s be honest here—white. Nothing negative. According to him and his minions, this country is and always has been pure as the driven snow. Like the anthem says, “Land of the free, and home of the brave.”
Thus, various Smithsonian museums must remove the Gay Pride flag, Rigoberto Gonzalez’s painting of immigrants crossing our southern border, Hugo Crosthwaite’s images of Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the Bible donated by civil rights leader Rev. Dr. Amos Brown.
The National Park Service has been ordered to remove signage referring to the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War Two, the massacre of Native Americans, and the impact of climate change on the parks themselves. The current administration is attacking an exhibit at Independence Park that tells the story of the slaves Washington brought to Philadelphia and kept there when he was president.
At the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, jazz coordinator Kevin Struthers was fired after thirty years, and dance director Jane Raleigh and her whole team were fired in favor of a man who openly decries diversity, equity, and inclusion in the dance community.
There seems to be no end to the lengths the MAGARevisionists will go to sanitize American history, American culture, and American reality. For many years, US high school students have been participating in a program called Poetry Out Loud. Each year, students pick several poems to memorize, and then engage in recitation contests, first in their own schools, then in regional, state, and finally national competitions. The idea is to promote the enjoyment and appreciation of poetry among young people.
Two of my poems have long been included among the poems students can pick from. Kids in high schools from Massachusetts to California have recited my poems, often making it to the next level of regional competition, and sometimes advancing even farther.
In 2011, Victoria DiMartile won the Kentucky state championship and was runner-up at the national competition. In 2017, Samara Huggins of Georgia won the national Poetry Out Loud crown. In 2019, Sam McGarvey won the Delaware state championship. In 2020, my poems—thanks to the students who chose them—made it to both the Vermont and Michigan state finals. And in 2023, Edward Wilson, Jr., became the Mississippi state champion and runner-up to the national champ.
But just the other day, I received this message from a friend of mine who is the English Department head at a school where I used to teach:
“For years we have been competing in the nationally funded Poetry Out Loud program,” she writes. “Your poems have been on that website in the past, and students have recited them for the competition. I recently received word that the Poetry Out Loud anthology is no longer being maintained by The Poetry Foundation. Here is some language from the email I received:
“As the nation prepares to commemorate its 250th anniversary, the federal government is emphasizing programming in 2026 that honors American history and culture. Accordingly, the poems selected for the 2025-2026 Poetry Out Loud competition highlight American poets as well as poems that embody the nation’s indomitable spirit, creativity, innovation and the nation’s rich cultural and historical heritage.
“The new anthology no longer has your poems. Natasha Trethewey and Maya Angelou are just two of many other poets who are no longer included on the current Poetry Out Loud website.”
Trethewey is a former United States Poet Laureate, and in 1993 Angelou—world-famous for her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—became the first poet to perform at a presidential inauguration since Robert Frost in 1961, so I’m in very good company. And I suppose I should be flattered that our Cultural Critic-in-Chief disapproves of me. If he and his henchmen were fans of my poetry, I would surely be doing something wrong.
For the record, here are the poems of mine that have been deemed unfit, unsuitable, and not sufficiently celebratory of the nation’s “rich cultural and historical heritage” for today’s American high schoolers.
Beautiful Wreckage
What if I didn’t shoot the old lady
running away from our patrol,
or the old man in the back of the head,
or the boy in the marketplace?
Or what if the boy—but he didn’t
have a grenade, and the woman in Hue
didn’t lie in the rain in a mortar pit
with seven Marines just for food.
Gaffney didn’t get hit in the knee,
Ames didn’t die in the river, Ski
didn’t die in a medevac chopper
between Con Thien and Da Nang.
In Vietnamese, Con Thien means
place of angels. What if it really was
instead of the place of rotting sandbags,
incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud.
What if the angels were Ames and Ski,
or the lady, the man, and the boy,
and they lifted Gaffney out of the mud
and healed his shattered knee?
What if none of it happened the way I said?
Would it all be a lie?
Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful?
Would the dead rise up and walk?
The Farmer
Each day I go into the fields
to see what is growing
and what remains to be done.
It is always the same thing: nothing
is growing; everything needs to be done.
Plow, harrow, disc, water, pray
till my bones ache and hands rub
blood-raw with honest labor—
all that grows is the slow
intransigent intensity of need.
I have sown my seed on soil
guaranteed by poverty to fail.
But I don’t complain—except
to passersby who ask me why
I work such barren earth.
They would not understand me
if I stooped to lift a rock
and hold it like a child, or laughed,
or told them it is their poverty
I labor to relieve. For them,
I complain. A farmer of dreams
knows how to pretend. A farmer of dreams
knows what it means to be patient.
Each day I go into the fields.
–=≈=–
Both poems can be found in Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems, published by McFarland & Company. W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy also published by McFarland.