On Independence Day

With a migraine attack, I try to ignore
the Pop Booms of fireworks. It’s a fireworks
in my brain. A display of colors.

Why do we have fireworks?
Aren’t the stars spectacle enough?
Isn’t the way the moon sheds

fragments of light over treetops
plenty of marvel? For now,
every shot of awe launches

a cannonball in my brain. I know
I’m not the only one of 38 million
with migraine. So there must

be others lined up in the nation’s
celebration, in a firing line of pain.
Perhaps we think of only the healthy

for whom the noise is simply distraction,
with colors flashing,
a festival of aahs, but every citizen here

is in this viewing / hearing area. Every
person with the right to happiness. Today,
if we celebrate freedom, let it be

from pain and the tyranny of the
high-decibel raucous.
After that, think about self and rule.

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee is the author of two award-winning collections, Intersection on Neptune (The Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2019), winner of the Prize Americana for Poetry 2018, and On the Altar of Greece (Gival Press, 2006), winner of the 2005 Gival Press Poetry Award and recipient of a 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award: Notable for Art Category. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies and journals internationally, including Lifelines, The Massachusetts Review, Medical Literary Messenger, Still You: Poems of Illness and Healing (Wolf Ridge Press, 2020), and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her website is www.donnajgelagotislee.com.