USA

This is
Zach Cole


A walk home from school through billows of car smoke.

Seeing those in the hallway whom you haven’t spoken to since third grade, as well as those whom you spoke to last night; conversations between two people that can hardly remember the other’s last name.

Wondering what life holds outside the white brick walls. Being afraid of it, anticipating it, planning for it. Wondering where all these people you have known for so long will go.

Too many problems blossoming in four short years, but also the many awkward loves and the occasional moment of realization where the grades are good and the friends are supportive. You want to tell them how much you love them...but you can’t.

This is Rockland District High School


Strips of homes that mix the construction stylings of Jimmy Carter and the Victorian Age; three-story goliaths painted a garish key lime green sitting next a one-story rut with chipped white paint.

Scrawling jigsaw puzzles of cars; pick up trucks, straight-outta-the factory of SUVs, your usual spattering of sedans. Purple Geo Metros that roar forth bellowing Hillary Duff.

A Main Street; two stories for every buildings, two lanes of traffics, two sidewalks. Bookstores, back alleys where kids can skate, cafe’s, old-fashioned barbershops and newly-minted banks. Clutching onto the old with one squeezing arm and tentatively reaching out to the future with the other.

Old men buzzing through half-filled streets in motorized wheelchairs.

This is Rockland

Founded in the days when all the homesteads were far apart from one another and things were about as colonial as they could get. The creation of this helped smooth out relations between North and South.

Factories and paper mills of old clearing the way for more housing. A worker laid off after thirty years operating heavy machinery, reading computer manuals athis kitchen table.

The state who birthed both America’s favorite horror writer and Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president, he of the bizarre moniker Hannibal Hamlin.

One of the places you can go where the steams still bubble a clear white and where the rights for habitats to thrive and for animals to live in relative peace are not just observed but insisted upon.

This is Maine

A place crafted by immigrants, for immigrants. A place that tries (and mostly succeeds) to include as many cultures and ideas as it can into one space; we have great thinkers and abysmal movie directors, we have hard laborers and small business owners. We have delinquents and spelling bee winners.

A country where a young man who works all day on a failing farm, looking at the metropolis on the horizon, wondering what exactly those glass towers hold and how long it will take him to get there.

This is a nation of which the framers would both be confused and impressed by; this is a nation of a thousand contradictions but steadfast goals and a united form of government respected by all.

This is a nation where a teenager from Philadelphia, shoved into a classroom with thirty plus kids and non-existent stability at home, can complete high school and finally do something he is proud of.

This is America


One large land mass that ripped apart eons ago. Later, one rugged-looking man stood at the base of an ice-capped mountain, ten or twenty of his kind behind him. His migration, indirectly, bring about all of us.
Rain forests and unusable deserts and regions when the sun hardly rises (or hardly lowers) for months at a time. Blazing heat and chilling cold.

Crude paper cut-outs of pure green standing in steep contrast with the rippling blue. The whites of unnumerable clouds obscure parts of them. A young woman in Russia and a retiree in Winter haven, Florida, both into the sky at just after eleven and witness the same flickering stars, sense the unfelt spinning of the planet.

A sphere that holds all of us, all life.

This is the world

If you taken an action, no matter how small, to improve the planet, you create a change for hope and a chance for freedom. An intoxicated man decides not to drive and a family of five is saved. Your good intentions are spreading positively all the way from where you are reading this to where I am writing this, from the moth of your well-intentioned cousin to the ears of English students sipping blueberry tea.

Thanks.

© All Copyright, Zachary Cole.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.