Hope for the Nation

This is a time for all good men and women to open their eyes and ears. It is time to awake from our slumber. We will find our nation’s hope where we have found it in the past, by looking to the values that we hold dear. We have often failed to live up to those values, or perhaps we have moved toward them haltingly, but we dare not abandon them.

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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