Imagine the Country You Want to Live In

This is a poem that has long been working within me. Yet I lacked its final arch, the bridge. I found it in Maya C. Popa latest share of August 11th.

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I cannot afford her membership, and still can use her prompt. Therefore I am grateful as Maya gave me the last needed strand to weave my poem into a final shape. Her prompt is:

”The August theme is end of summer. It’s a feeling as much as anything. Feel free to interpret the theme broadly!”

This social justice poem ends with a vision for what could be. I invite you to add your own hopes, dreams, and ideas to the open, anonymous Google Form “Shared Visions, Hopes & Dreams”.

And if I may ask to please share this link: https://forms.gle/38GbirQKabv4CmCr8

If you ask five people directly (by email, in a DM, in a comment) to contribute and share it again with five people, you are going to build your vision together. The form is only the vehicle. All answers are openly visible. If you consider promoting it in essays, articles or notes I’d be thrilled.

False Harvest

The sun hangs low, swollen with heat,
pouring its last fire on fields already stripped too early.
Crates marked safe for market stink of sweetness turned sour.

Wasps patrol the air —
drawn to the flesh left to spoil under orders from men
who have never bent to plant or pick.

Wind drags the stench from sealed grain silos
where the poor are turned away,
and guards tear out the last milkweed
where monarchs once rested on their way south.

At the edge of the sky,
storm towers climb and twist into the shape of laws
that flatten every stalk in their path.
The fields without title get no warning;
their roots drown first.

Flocks lift, wheel, and scatter —
nets cast in the dark have emptied their nesting ground.
In roadside ditches, children lie still in the heat,
their small bones picked over by the law of the hawk.

Rain is promised,
the kind that could clear the air,
yet the clouds break into dust
that coats the hands still reaching for drink.

Seed corn is seized before it can meet the soil,
locked in rooms without windows.
Midwives are turned from the gates,
their bags heavy with remedies never delivered.

Water is sold dear in the square
though the river runs full behind guarded levees.
The wells, once open to all,
are boarded over by night.

Still, the storm draws nearer.
Inside the dark, pens scratch on paper —
marking which rows to cut,
which fruit to burn,
which names to scrape from the walls of the granary.

Then, in the heart of the gale,
hands find each other.
They lash poles, stack sandbags,
string wire around a space lit from within.
A Faraday’s cage of dignity and care,
holding what must live through the strike —
the maps, the seeds,
the stories of how a harvest once belonged to all.

The wind screams past;
inside, people kneel in the glow,
naming aloud the country they will plant again:

A place where the vote belongs to the people,
money barred from the gates;
where governance serves the common good,
strong with the protections of air, water, and soil;
where no one is caged for their birthplace
and justice cannot be bought;
where the bodies of women and all who seek care
are free by law;
where public works remain public,
and rights are more than paper.

When the storm’s eye passes,
they step out into air sharp with the scent of rain.
The earth, still warm from the last of the sun,
takes the seed into its dark, steady hold.
And the fields, in time,
will hum with wings that do not hunt —
the harvest claimed by those who bent to tend it.

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    When Healing Means Losing Everything

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Monty, in full philosopher’s pose, ready to discuss the deeper meaning of snack time and social justice.