They raise their hands,
crying God Bless America,
as if heaven’s ear is deaf to the echo of stolen chants,
as if the soil beneath their polished shoes
does not groan with the bones of the first peoples,
their songs stifled by concrete and cold steel.
The rivers remember—
they carry the ashes of nations
scorched in the name of progress and gold.
They run thick with the phantom sweat of fields
where a people, bound in chains, sang a freedom
they would not live to see.
The wind remembers—
it howls with the tongues of children
ripped from mothers’ arms at the auction block,
and again at the border.
It carries the dust of villages with foreign names,
leveled by fire from above,
and the last breath of men who whispered
I can’t breathe on home soil.
The earth remembers—
its veins mined, its gardens salted for spite,
its sacred mountains hollowed out for the ore inside.
It trembles with the memory of iron hulls,
of the middle passage’s nightmare,
a forced pilgrimage that built a nation
on the backs of the damned.
And yet they dare—
in halls of power built by those same hands,
to call themselves blessed,
to crown themselves chosen,
while their altars drip with blood not their own,
anointing their dollars with it.
But justice is not blind—
it is patient, and it keeps accounts
in a ledger not of ink, but of scar tissue.
Every lash of the whip has a corresponding stripe upon the soul.
Every treaty betrayed is a crack in the foundation.
Every prayer drowned beneath the Atlantic
has salted the waves that now rise with the storm.
No nation, no matter how mighty, escapes the harvest
of the seeds it sows.
And when the reaping comes,
it will not be with hymns or parades,
but with the sound of walls falling—
not of stone, but of delusion.
Of idols crumbling—not of marble,
but of reputation and legacy.
Of a name once shouted in pride
now spoken only in shame,
a cautionary tale for the ages.
Divine justice does not bless—
it remembers.
It holds the memory of every sin in its perfect, terrible balance.
And America, in all its thunderous glory and quiet pain,
is remembered well.
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