GOLDIE HAWN’S RESPONSE

Languid and honey-skinned –

no, goldly golden -,

triceps tight as a thirteen-year-old’s

(don’t tell me she’s fifty-six!),

Goldie looks diagonally out of the screen

and tells us that on 9/11 she wept.

Then she lifts a tight triceps,

revelling in synthetic youth,

and remarks, ‘I decided to knit the American flag.

‘Yes, I’ll purl and plain my way through fifty stars

from Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut

all the way across Indian territories

and lands accepted from a has-been empire

to far Alaska and Hawaii.

Shine, galaxy of states

(some death penalty, some not),

all pledging allegiance to my knitting

with their right hands on their hearts –

the hands of fifty states on stellar hearts.

And I’ll not cease from weeping

as the pure wool yarn

gallops down my patriotic needles

drenched by these hundred percent American tears.

‘This is the least I can do

when our boys have sacrificed

so much more than wool –

knit one, purl two.

As my tear drops fall,

so then did their blood,

or it boiled –

purl two, knit one.

‘And when it’s done, I’ll hoist my flag

to the top of its gibbet

in the mornings and to strains of taps

I’ll lower it in the evenings –

knit one, drop two, drop two thousand eight hundred and one.’

Goldie, off camera now,

examines the footage

with critical concern.