With its websites
FrontPage Mag, Jihad Watch, and TruthRevolt, the David Horowitz Freedom Center
is home to some of the most prominent warriors in the fight against the unholy
alliance of radical Islam and the radical left: Horowitz himself, Peter
Collier, Robert Spencer, and Daniel Greenfield, to name a few. But the dynamo
that powers the Freedom Center, the unsung beating heart of the organization,
is its Chief Operating Officer Michael Finch. Finch – full disclosure – is also
a friend of mine, and as such I am proud to introduce to FrontPage readers his
first work of poetry, Finding Home.
Considering the
Freedom Center’s aggressive political work, poetry may not be something one
would expect to find as part of its intellectual arsenal. But as many
conservative writers such as Andrew Klavan and myself have noted for years,
reclaiming America means reclaiming the culture, and that means engaging in the
arts. As Finch writes in his introduction, “[I]f as a people, and a nation, we
can return to something lost, recovering something from our culture that has
been torn, then it can only happen through art.” The art of Finding Home
is Michael Finch’s deeply personal contribution to the culture war.
“I have spent my
life searching for America,” he continues in his introduction, “for what we
have lost. And always searching for home. We are a rootless people, a rootless
nation, it is a great strength as we always strive and push out and go beyond
all limits. But who can deny the void that it leaves?”
Over the course of
nearly three dozen short nostalgic poems redolent of Finch’s literary
influences Wendell Berry, Robert Penn Warren, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Finding
Home takes us back across that void to the welcoming panoramas of his
native Midwestern America in a simpler time. In the course of that journey he,
like many of us, is a “Weary, rootless traveler in search of my past and of an
America gone.” He asks “the breeze that blows / Upon my tired eyes; take me to
your destination – / Home, take me where your peaceful mind lies.”
These poems –
largely about home, nature, love, and an idyllic America – and are grouped into
four sections: “Middle America”; “The Martyrs”; “Loves, New and Lost”; and “America.”
In “Middle
America,” Finch brings to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the country of
his youth. From “Prairie Day”:
My mind remembers
a soft, warm wind,
Sweet earth scent,
and billows of clouds
In a wide prairie
sky of youth’s eternal hope.
Where have you
gone?
From “My
Wisconsin”:
Gentle glacier-cut
valley, bluffs in beauty;
Below, the earth
sleeps ahead of
Spring’s coming
thaw and planters’ seed.
High upon the wide
sky, geese come home, home again.
Living in the
moderate climate of urban California now, Finch longs for the seasons of home.
From “Note from California”:
I miss the smell
of harvest corn,
Leaves burning
sweet in autumn sky,
Long walks down
your covered path.
I miss the sound
of winter’s eve,
Howling winds from
corners’ bend.
Soft falling snow
covers the scar –
World gone mad so
swift in time.
[…]
I miss the high
sky.
I miss the fires
burning.
O, sweet autumn,
Take me home in
your wind.
“The Martyrs”
section breaks from Finch’s personal reflections to consist of two historical
poems – “To Constantinople Sailed” and “Plains of Ninevah Gone” – in which he
hails “the last of the righteous Christians,” “the last of the great kings and
knights on angel wings,” martyrs that may have since been forgotten by “the
world and the ‘Church,’” but whose lives and deeds are written in The Book of
Life for all time, and for whom there will one day be justice:
But be sure:
Accounts are kept, mercy not spared for the
Murdering Umma or
the self-righteous West.
Some of the titles
from “Loves, New and Lost” hint at the more romantic, yearning mood in that section:
“But a Dream,” “Passions Fleeting Time,” “Unrequited,” “Beyond Reach.” A
particularly beautiful passage from “Tonight”:
Years from now
when the winds blow again,
When you stare at
the midnight’s blue of
The setting sun,
lined mountains black against
A cobalt sky, do
one thing for the one who loved you:
Think of me when
your eyes gaze at the wondrous sky,
Your eyes
searching the heavens for one,
When the breeze blows
one last time through your hair,
Do one final
thing. Think of me.
Seven poems of the
section “America” round out the collection: a personal lament for the country
that took a disastrous turn half a century ago. In a poem titled “The 1960’s,”
Finch harkens back to boyhood in a time of American post-war glory, when the
sun suddenly set on the “grand days of summer” and “the 60’s wrought
destruction.” The sun then rose on an “America turned to storm, of innocence
gone.” In “And Where Did Liberty Go?” Finch laments that the liberty our
forefathers won at battle sites like Sharpsburg and Ticonderoga “died into a
false god of equality and a radical / Creed that drove utopia hard and ended
all free men.” Now Finch urges, “Pray, sweet America, for us all / We only
caught a glimpse, now you’re gone.”
Finding Home is a personal
volume to be sure, but make no mistake: it is more than a collection of one
American’s wistful memories and road trips across Midwestern landscapes, though
there can be immeasurable value in that for readers his poetry touches. It is also
a call for restoration, for “remaking freedom,” for affirming the “endless and
timeless / And tested truths that need be steadfast, held, tradition-true.” In
addition to sparking in the reader his or her own memories of, and longing for,
a better America, Finding Home is inspiration for us to strive to do
just that –find home, return to something lost, recover what has been torn away,
“turn on the path of our choosing.” It is not just a lament for a lost past,
but inspiration for us to revive it.
From FrontPage Mag, 11/19/15
