ALANA RADER

Today

This land is your land.
Is it mine? Do I even want to claim it,
or name it?
This scorched earth, a rebirth
out of sync, spinning.
Blind to the hate and the fires,
conspiring against itself.
Logging miles, counting smiles
from those strange and new.
Gone in a blink, I sink and think,
reflecting on this red, white and blue
while others fan the smoke and stoke
this burn mosaic,
prosaic in its destruction.
A wildfire that folx distort,
contorting their biases/hypocrisies,
while clutching a book, lost in translation.
One nation—splitting in two,
like my heart or fault lines...
We drive through the desert,
thirsty for change.
Feeding the fires of hope,
but it’s strange,
while traipsing on stolen land, spanning out
over spacious skies, and I devise
words, rhymes, lines of text to heal.
Concealing so much pain, oh beautiful hurt.
Wounds from the womb
at the surface, this circus,
a pile of ash, lashing out and messy.
This clearing, this space—
it can’t replace what we lost...
Who we’ve lost. But growth can creep in,
a bit of green, in a flash,
springing forth from the ash.
The ultimate destruction,
an abduction of doubt.
Letting it out
and in. This land of liberty,
untapped capacity with tenacity and possibility.
Ringing out from sea...
to shining sea.

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