Tag: Poetry

Simulacrum

I stand here

myself and another

distantly trying to whisper words into your ear,

trying to dry the tears from my eyes

I try to cement the feeling of loss

into some monument of memory

so that whoever stumbles upon it,

with their idle tasks buzzing in their head,

will know that there was a heart there,

a feeling and a life that shouldn’t be forgotten.

Capgras syndrome replaced us all,

bit by bit and day by day.

A lack of action erasing the actions we took,

and a single action immobilizing us.

We struggle to know,

when we lift a finger to point at the sunrise

or a bird landing in a tree beautifully silent,

that our choices have meaning and weight.

That ache

when the wind stops and the world is muted,

is reason for us knowing the worth of it all.

Where we see the light through branches,

and know the peace

of silently touching someone’s head

to comfort them,

we find our honest reply.

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.