Civil Dawn

For years, decades

they have sat in powerful positions

and at dinner tables never once unset.

They have slowly gone deaf

from the music only they can listen to.

They cannot hear the earth,

nor the hungry people on it,

nor the mother crying from exhaustion,

nor the child without support,

the family without a winter’s heat,

the home without a home.

Even as the crowd lifted them higher

and higher,

they grew to not hear them

or their cries for fairness.

They chose to define fairness in unfair ways,

to separate and choose issues or people

like putting food on a plate.

Their instinct turned to control

and controlling control,

even with it a silver plate

they remained hungry.

But reigns end,

Kings fall.

The exhausted people can pull enough energy

to pull them all down,

to mouth the words asking for equity

or scream the injustices.

oh, country.

Your foreign soil is beautiful but broken,

just as my native land is.

The systems just as broken,

just as full of bias and dismissal.

Just as built by foreigners who love

stronger than the workers beside them,

built up by the women torn down,

grown by the children never raised,

fed by the father who didn’t eat,

backed by the people they turned their backs on.

We, you, I

have built the country,

not out of duty, but blood and sacrifice.