I love my country. I’m in love with United States of America. This nation’s 250-year journey is the greatest story I know, the adventure of a people born under a revolutionary promise of fundamental equality that we betrayed from the very beginning and have never fulfilled, but which yet remains at the heart of it all, a vital, driving force that changed the world and is still our best weapon in the long struggle for justice and human dignity. To me, this is America’s real “manifest destiny”: to make the ringing phrases of 1776 our way of life, at long last.

What a vocation we have, what a human drama we are. Walt Whitman, as so often, said it best:

“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations…

“Other states indicate themselves in their deputies . . . but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people.”

That’s still true, I think.

You may well find all this simple-minded, sappy, laughable, or even malignant. That’s right and proper. We all must reach our conclusions about America, because she insists upon it in a way other countries don’t. I’ve been blessed to have seen a good deal of the world in my long career as a journalist, reporting from more than eighty countries, living overseas for years, first as a young man and later as a professional. It’s long been clear to me: We’re different. More than we know.

You can take an American, any American, pick ‘em up and plop ‘em down anywhere in the world. Doesn’t matter who—Trump voters, Democrats, old, young, any background. Within a few minutes, people all around will be saying to themselves, “There’s an American.” They see us as one people, even if we don’t any more.

So I love us. Sorry/not sorry. But it’s not a blind love. It can’t be, given our history. To deny the darkness in America is to lie about our own lives, and that is the opposite of love, which lives only in truth. To love a country truthfully is not to flatter it. It is not to mistake rulers for the people, or political slogans for the soil and the shared history under it, or flags for the memories of the living and the dead.

Tell the truth. Tell it all. That’s real patriotism.

Over the past day, I’ve been thinking about this, because I’ve been reading a little—a very little—Venezuelan poetry. One day after President Donald Trump’s takeover of Venezuela and military seizure of the dictator Nicolás Maduro to stand trial in the US, it is clear that our country’s well-being is now tied to the people of Venezuela. (I have posted a brief video explainer on the US operation here).

So, thinking about this column, I looked south, to Caracas and the beautiful land of the nation our president says we will now “run.”

Venezuelan poetry—especially in the last century—has understood the contradictions of loving one’s country with painful clarity. It offers a model of patriotism that refuses illusion but refuses abandonment as well.

Venezuelan poets seem to me to write of their homeland not as a power, but as a presence: a childhood house, the name of a river, a voice remembered. In the few poems that I have managed to find, the nation appears as something almost vulnerable. Their history, recent and beyond, has often been painful and racked with conflict. What is striking in the poetry this history has produced is not bitterness, but fidelity. These poems do not deny what has been lost. They insist on loving what remains.

This is not the patriotism of triumph or myth. It is the patriotism of civil resistance through tenderness and brave recognition. There is also a kind of singing mystery in Venezuelan poetry, a quality I associate with the magic realism of Latin America.

So, two poems from this proud nation, one whose troubled history is linked with our own troubled history.

—Terry

Rafael Cadenas is Venezuela’s most renowned living poet. At 95 years old, he is the first Venezuelan author to receive the Cervantes Prize, awarded annually to honor the lifetime achievement of an outstanding writer in the Spanish language. He seems to be to be a bit of a surrealist, but exact about it.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSo much of you remains unopened, like music lost inside me.Country to which I return every time I go broke.Seal, celebration, vault of trunks.

You’ve never denied me your virgin milk.

My ebb, my secret source, my real counterpart.

I can’t determine the reach of your scent, but know you’ve beenthere at all my starting points, wrapping me up,thoughtful East, as in a ceremony.

Country where the lines of my hand lead, site where I’m someone else,my wedding ring, you’re close to the core.

— translated by Forrest Gander

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Eugenio Montejo (1938-2008) was a fierce modernist poet, of the 20th Century, honored in his country and beyond. He seems to me to play with time and meaning in a haunting way, offering a refracted sense of history tinged with sadness.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published The earth turned to bring us closer, it spun on itself and within us, and finally joined us together in this dream as written in the Symposium. Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices; time passed in minutes and millennia. An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh arrived in Nebraska. A rooster was singing some distance from the world, in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers. The earth was spinning with its music carrying us on board; it didn't stop turning a single moment as if so much love, so much that's miraculous was only an adagio written long ago in the Symposium's score.