By Michael Tyler, EJS Poet-in-Residence
This is who we are, huddled beneath our spacious skies,
Amidst amber waves of blood-soaked faith and purple mountain lies.
We wretched lot of disparate kin, all yearning to be free,
Pledge allegiance to a cause, from sea to shining sea.
America, great America, we proclaim our fruited fame,
While espousing what we’re dousing on our Lady’s beaconed flame.
This is who we were, when we landed with pilgrim feet,
To colonize our passion and legitimize our deceit;
When we penned our Constitution, every self-absolving page,
With feathered quills dipped in native blood and genocidal rage.
When we glorified our founding and sanctified ourselves as good,
By a biased convocation of a privileged brotherhood.
This is who we’ve been, a nation naturalized by strife,
With no conviction for morality or the sanctity of life.
What mercy did our Fathers show towards the people that they found?
What compassion did they give the souls they bought and beat and bound?
What moment in our conception were women mentioned in our laws?
What day has come and gone when we have reconciled our flaws?
This is who we see, in the crosshairs of our fate,
When decency becomes heresy as we sermonize our hate;
When our alabaster cities watch their delusions disappear;
When their patriotic dreams become the nightmares that they fear;
When we demonize with spiteful eyes our sisters and our brothers;
When the devotion to our guns exceeds the love we have for mothers.
The birth of this nation, and the christening of its myth,
Blessed a sacred fabrication as the substance of its pith,
So it could purify and justify the desecration in its sin,
To consecrate the systems of stigmatizing skin.
Hence, violence is our virtue and what distinguishes us the most.
It is what we proudly hail in our jingoistic boasts.
We bend and bow to priests, who vow to keep us tribal,
Blasting sacrilegious screeds from a double-barreled Bible.
Then we pistol-pack our prayers, in our bullet-riddled pews,
And point a blaming finger, when we hear the daily news.
We are our terrorists and our killers, our assassins and our knaves.
We are why our children die and their classrooms are their graves.
Yes, this is who we are in this land of liberty.
There’s no mystery in the history of our lethal liturgy.
We want the fables of our morals and the fantasies of our beliefs,
To homogenize our conduct with our stars and stripes motifs.
So, no more talk of our good nature and our holy-watered creeds.
We are exactly who we are from the evil in our deeds.