Ava Wahl
We watched,
starstruck and speechless,
At the edge of our seats,
Pulled towards the screen’s violent light, blinding, binding
As the very strings of this nation unraveled,
Frayed by the unbridled force of fury,
A rage wielded by the ever faithful,
ever hateful
A hole was torn in the fabric of a nation,
This nation built by slave owners and entitled men,
This gash opened by “patriots”, who wish freedom for only a few
And carry the Confederate flag
The throng throbbed, storming through barriers
And fractured America in one instant
With no purpose but to disrupt, to destruct, to construct
A fabled victory built on shaky floorboards bound to break
Six lives, extinguished, just like that
Six souls with their stories cut short
A blood stain, an unloved stain, scorched into fragile cloth, and it read:
January 6th, 2021.
…
So they say,
Truth is stranger than fiction
And lack thereof creates the friction
That ignites us.
As much as we blame fire on the sun or a cigarette,
We are all arsonists.
We all lit the fire to burn down our own home.
But this story isn’t over yet.
It’s foolish to say we can forget
The war we’ve fought on our own ground
This nation’s battle isn’t set, how much blood is there left to let?
This does not end right here, right now,
America is not yet ready to take its bow
We’ve beaten this pestilence, this pandemic
And lived to tell the tale
But there’s an even bigger beast, a more trying test on our nation
That we must not fail
Who would have dreamed that
even the transfer of power would have been put on trial?
Shunned and stunned by denial,
by violence so vile
Who would have dreamed that
one day this dream would have become nightmare
A mess left to be cleaned,
a system meant to be rebuilt
Yet, we can still mend this quilt
By wielding not weapons, but a needle
A needle poised to sew the pieces back together with patience and
To weave in new threads, those left behind by the founders
New colors and kinds to add strength to this crafted creation and
Paint this nation anew