By Beth Osborne
America, you are a patchwork.
Yet, you’ve tried to forget
what you’re made of.
You began with audacious claims –
Equality
Liberty
Happiness as a pursuit
Living up to these has been a grasp
And a miss
A step forward
A freefall back
What is America?
She’s been called many refrains
She welcomed yet erased
A beacon of salvation
A place of such misery
She made a social contract,
But kept changing the language,
And who could sign.
America is
A mirage, a dream
A charade, a promise
America is war and secret ops and
Also, very much a gun
Rebellions, succession, a North and a South
She has always been in angst,
The country, built on no god or king
Keeps letting the lords and the elites weigh its scales of justice
She’s been to the brim with hate
Despite her melting pot
She’s made so many fight for the chance to simply exist.
There have always been two faces:
A heart and a rot
Janus plunged in duality, beginnings and gates
An assaulting contradiction whose true identity is still unknown
America, a land stolen, never discovered
The founders took it, and although they declared their independence from tyranny, did create some of their own.
It’s not un-American to point out the flaws; it’s wholly patriotic to do so.
America is broken.
shackled.
no home for many.
Is this who we are?
As the Constitution fades into the machine of hate
The question becomes, when do we, the people, all the people, reject this purgatory of injustice and inequality?
America is greed over humanity.
Will it always be?
Aren’t we more beautiful
When brave means
We stand with a whole heart that beats with hope
If we lose that, we’ve lost it all.
So we are here together for something far greater than we can imagine.
It’s more than a day or a moment.
It’s a movement
America is
What we say it can be
And the only thing that should reign
Is equality
We are no longer the resistance; we are the rebellion.
Rage, rage, Thomas said, against the dying of the light that cast such a closing shadow.
America is in the moment of her most consequential fight.