AMERICANS IN AN ANCIENT LAND
![Tuscany.png](https://static.spacecrafted.com/c16cedb56ade42f28a800ed78cece1b1/i/f68a1fe88ffd4505bccaa9b07c2de228/1/4SoifmQp45JMgBnHjfgmz/Tuscany.png)
- We look out at green hills
- worn round by centuries of feet and rain
- from the terrace of a Tuscan house
- cracked, weathered, moss coated,
- new once, in the days of Galileo,
- inherited by generation upon generation
- of Strozzis then Geradescas
- born within its welcoming walls.
- A hand touching a Tuscan wall
- knows that it is temporary, passing, vulnerable.
- So many Tuscans have touched that spot before,
- all of them dust now, the house accepting,
- sheltering, their descendants, their guests.
- In our own country, we made the walls.
- The wood, the glass, the tiles
- are all younger than we are.
- We shaped them, put them where they are,
- in a house we built on land no one had ever claimed before.
- No tribes, no settlers, no Neanderthals, no one.
- The mountains we see from there are jagged, pathless, raw.
- No sequence, no one before us.
- No context, we are all of it,
- generators not inheritors,
- a story at its beginning.