Mark shared this poem with me. I shared it with my poem a week email list. Someone from that list shared it with their husband who shared it when his band played at the Whitaker Music Festival at the Botanical Garden. Mark tossed a pebble in a pond and the ripples of that pebble traveled far. 
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, outside his City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, San Francisco.
“PITY THE NATION"
(After Khalil Gibran)
(After Khalil Gibran)
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerers
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerers
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!
Sweet land of liberty!
