Ken Burns

The vandals came at night
Tarring the asphalt with the coward’s color.
Their message—candidate and date—
Reading both ways, at the bend in our road.
The town’s crew tried twice to cover it,
But the words bled through, defiant.
We troubled ourselves and argued for a response:
To stomp on it, to jump over, or go around.
We went around—in every season,
For five years,
The yellow fading, the outrage permanent,
The scar invading each day’s promise.

Political photographs are deceptive things. They are caught in the middle of the action, the spin of a campaign or backstory, and offer subtle nods to larger currents in our country’s history. Often, if you listen carefully to these images, you’ll hear hints of an American tension: the call for more rights and freedom, and the simultaneous, equally loud cry for exclusion based on differences—and for a compromised version of our participatory democracy.