Famine of the Spirit

"Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
(Matthew 5:3)

This is what happens when you feed a country fear—
starve it of the stranger’s face, the reaching hand,
strip it of trust in things that mend,
grow its faith in divides that appear.

Pour them hollow food, rich in grease and salt,
watch them drink down dreams that burn,
bowing to screens that endlessly churn
promises of greatness in a vault
they can never quite hold.

Trap them in cages of ancient letters turned to chains.
Tell them they’re bound for glory’s reign,
blind to the world beyond the claims they uphold.

Make mothers carry what they did not choose,
make men cradle guns they’ll use.
Let bullets scatter through streets and schools,
call it strength, call it freedom’s rules.

Give them faith, but hollow it through,
give them pride, poison it blue,
hand them the vote, then twist the path—
and watch as they drift on tides of wrath.

The other half, meanwhile, turns away,
alienated from their quiet hunger,
distracted by identities offered for display,
so scared of words, though once words held power—
words that built bridges in a darker hour.

Here is a country starving on its own illusions,
its myths feeding a body’s slow collapse,
growing ever weaker, yet fiercely clasping
the fading dream of itself.

Make America Great Again?
Were you ever great? To which broken past
do you wish to return? To slavery’s chains?
To segregation’s glass? To silencing voices
with bullets and pain?

Make America great, make America awake for the first time,
with sight unflinching, a gaze that sees
the cracks in its foundation, the promises half-told,
the many unseen, stories held in its fold.

Look beyond stars and banners raised high,
see those left in the shadow, and ask why.
What if, for once, you didn’t turn away,
but let light flood every inch of gray?

Wake, not to might or dreams of power,
but to truths in the broken, to voices quiet,
to the strength of hands linked across divides—
not towers, but unity that never dies.

Make America awake, its sight whole and true,
embracing all, becoming more
than a dream postponed, more than a name—
a soil where all are held, a land that’s new.