A Nation's Hope

On Inauguration Day, 2017, I began a series of journalistic poetry that I called, “Bearing Witness to the Times.” With that first poem, I spoke of how we can find hope. Today I still think that this is how we find our way back home.

When Hope Is Set in Stone

(Thoughts on inauguration day)

Photo by Martin Child / Robert Harding

(Getty Images)

We put our heroes in marble

Thinking we give them honor

When in fact

We do it for ourselves.

Having learned that we can so quickly

Misplace our values

Or set aside our highest ideals,

We chisel from the stone –

Or cast in bronze –

Those images we admire.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial (Wikipedia photo)

    
        Justice and wisdom
        Come through those marble faces,

        As do fidelity and compassion –

        Because our own hands

        Carved them 

        While we were delighting

        In our better angels.

Martin Luther King Memorial
Photo by Alan Kkotok

Marble faces and bronze statues

Look out on our parades

Whether we march in hope

Or walk in fear and hatred.

If we stop to look back

Into their unchanging eyes

There is a chance

We might remember

Why we set those ideals in polished rock.

Perhaps we will recall

Those better days

When we etched our hopes in stone.

                                 ~ Charles Kinnaird

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Who Are We, and What Do We Stand For?

Today's post is a repeat from April 30, 2017. It is my poem to commemorate who we are as a people, and where we stood at that first 100-day mark in a new presidency.  As the president continues to hold campaign-style rallies, we must ask ourselves again, who are we, and what do we stand for?

100 Days

Can the first one hundred days 
Unfold the path before us?

The New Deal reshaped a nation.

The Great Society held out promise

But did not foretell the struggle

And the unraveling that would come.

These one hundred days –

Marked by petty discord,

Wartime posturing,

And confused uncertainty –

May be telling our own story.

While many voices still call out

For justice and equality,

Many others turn a blind eye

To the fascist greed

That shapes the public square.

Sober minds can recall missteps in our past:

A constitution that counted three-fifths of a person

To accommodate slaveholders;

A Supreme Court’s Dred Scott Decision;

A government enforcing the Indian Removal Act.

A country that sings “Let freedom ring”

While shackling slaves

And engaging in genocidal acts

Has been our paradox

Of good and evil.

Taking pains to correct past mistakes,

Our country has made gains

In “liberty and justice for all.”

Now we carefully negotiate our way

Through one hundred days of chaos,

Wondering if those gains will be lost.

“This cannot be us,”

We cry in dismay,

“We are better than this!”

This is, indeed, us.

We are those things we hate

In one another.

Where do we go from here,

Now that our true colors

Are on display?

In the clear light

And in the aftermath of an electoral vote,

Perhaps we see ourselves too clearly,

Or perhaps we do not see at all.

We live with divided allegiances

And shared dreams,

Holding out hope

That our best efforts

May yet correct

Our current missteps.

                                                ~ CK

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