America,

I hear you cry, “Make America Great Again!”
But I ask you....when were you great?

Was it the long trails where the land wept?
Was it when the auctioneer’s hammer fell?
Was it in the fields where brothers’ blood turned soil to mud,
a nation sundered.

Was it beneath the bloodied boughs?
Was it when his battered body was pulled from the water,
Was it on the streets of Montgomery,
where dreams met firehoses and snarling dogs?

Was it when barbed wire stretched across the land,
and camps filled with neighbors overnight?

Was it when women wanted to be heard?
Was it when their bodies were claimed by law?

No vote.
No choice.
No right.

No more camps, no more barbed wire,
Now we have holding cells and chartered flights,
Now we have quotas and swift removals,
Now we send them south,
dreams confiscated at the border.

Dearest Republic, your greatness is not conquest,
not wealth, not armies, nor monuments of stone.
It waits beneath the weight of your failures,
calling not from shining cities, but from beneath their ruin.

I see you, America.
The elder recalling the past, the youth daring to dream beyond it.
I see the immigrant, bearing the weight of crossing.
And you, watching the sky, mourning what was lost.

What was, is gone.

You cry out for greatness, but I cry for truth!
Let loose the lies of the past; let masks be torn.

Truth breaks where denial runs deepest.

I see bodies pressed to the ground,
the kneel, the fist, the endless protest.

This is where democracy lives. Not in proclamations, but in acts,
In the slow, patient labor of those who build and rebuild the world.

Democracy, you are not yet born.
You are the unending task,
the silent work of uncounted hands.
What you seek is not behind you—it waits,
not in triumphs etched in marble—scattered by the wind,
nor in empires—soon swallowed by the sand.

And when the sand comes, as it must,
Let it bury not despair, but the seeds of something new,
The memory of those who refused to be broken,
Who stood unshaken before the vastness, and dared to begin—

again

O America, rise. Live your creed.
Take the hands of the forgotten;
hold them, as long as the sky holds light.

—Augustus