Tag: dissent

• A Sky That Never Promised Freedom

  “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
  —The Declaration of Independence

  We strike the match,
  follow the fuse.
  Gunpowder curls into skyborne bloom—
  a brief, bright rupture
  meant to mark the birth of liberty.

  We call it celebration,
  remembrance,
  but forget the cost behind the color.

  In the house that Washington built,
  a petty despot drags his shadow through halls,
  demanding fealty not to a flag,
  but to his name—
  thin-skinned,
  thick with vengeance.

  Pasty cowards
  with worn knees
  find the floor—
  not in protest,
  but in pretense—
  mouths clenched
  like fists too timid to rise,
  vows collapsing into ash.

  Above them,
  in a gilt frame among the dead,
  Jefferson watches.
  He sees them squirm
  beneath chandeliers
  they dare not rattle.

  He once wrote of tyrants,
  that a man marked by such acts
  is unfit to rule a free people.

  The ink endures,
  though the spine has gone slack.

  And still, above the seated stone
  of Lincoln’s gaze
  the fireworks rise—
  hollow, obedient,
  bursting against a sky
  that never promised freedom,
  only the chance
  to fight for it.

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  July 4, 2025

  dissent, protest poetry

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• While the Elk Were Moving

  To my right,
  Longs Peak rises jagged through pine.
  To my left,
  a wide meadow scattered with boulders—
  bones from the old world.

  Below, a stream elegies the slope,
  snowmelt running fast over stone
  worn smooth by thaw and thunder.

  This morning, an elk herd passed through—
  massive, deliberate,
  moving with the grace of dancers,
  as if gravity had chosen to spare them.

  Not silence,
  but the absence of familiar noise.
  No voices. No engines.
  No signal or screen.

  Just the wind-clipped scratch of pen on paper,
  and a stillness with weight—
  the kind that settles like mist on skin,
  that hushes thought.

  In the fragile solitude of mountains,
  one can almost forget how the edges burn.

  Tomorrow I’ll hike back down, return—
  to towers, to headlines,
  to see what’s become of things—
  to see if the center held,
  or if, while the elk were moving,
  the scaffolding finally collapsed.

  He deployed Marines to American streets—
  maybe that was the tilt.
  Maybe not.

  Days fold behind each other
  like stage sets in the dark.

  Blanket pardons.
  Raids without warrants.
  Agents at schools,
  asking children for names.
  Reporters cuffed.
  A free press recast as enemy of the people.

  The Justice Department, a private shield.
  Federal hands bending toward one voice—
  like sunflowers to heat.

  He speaks of a third term
  the way we speak of death:
  a joke, until it isn’t.

  Warnings come,
  dressed in neutral tones:
  constitutional crisis,
  erosion of norms,
  precedent dissolved.

  But warnings read like museum plaques
  once fire has claimed the foundation.

  At some point, it stops being if—
  and the only question left
  is whether we’re still watching,
  or simply learning to live inside the collapse.

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  This poem first appeared in The New Verse News. It was adapted from the introduction I wrote for the recent protest poetry collection, Record of Dissent.

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  July 4, 2025

  dissent, protest poetry

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