Tuesday Poem: "Were You Ever Great?" by Andrew M. Bell

Photo Credit: Andrew M. Bell

Today, along with my youngest son and his girlfriend, I attended a Black Lives Matter protest which gathered in Cathedral Square, Christchurch. Despite it being a day of constant drizzle, what the Irish call poetically "a soft rain", a large crowd of people gathered to express their utter disgust at the murder of George Floyd by white police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

Since the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, the global community have witnessed a former global superpower which seems to be in rapid decline. Those Americans who never supported Trump feel that he has been both a catalyst and a fomentor of that disintegration of their society.

In response to this ever-escalating situation in America and to George Floyd's brutal murder which is just the latest in a long line of American police killings of African Americans, I offer this poem:

Were you ever great, America?

Were you great when the starving pilgrims

were saved by your indigenous inhabitants?

Were you great when the settlers pushed west

bringing disease and decimation

to the many nations who had been there

for thousands of years?

Were you great when you assassinated

the President who abolished slavery?

Were you great a century later when you assassinated

the President who advocated black civil rights?

Were you great when you dropped atomic bombs

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Were you great when the CIA overthrew

Salvador Allende in Chile?

Were you great when Reagan funnelled arms and money

to the Contras to overthrow the Sandinistas?

Were you great when you defoliated

sixty percent of Vietnam?

Were you great when you invaded Iraq

because a President and his cronies lied?

You cannot make yourself “great again”

because you were never great.

Like the Roman Empire, you merely

possessed superior technology and

an inflated sense of your own importance

so you could bully the world to get your own way.

And now, like the procession of empires before you,

your corruption and decadence have grown

into a cancer that feeds on the venal and inane.

Fellow feeling has dissolved

in your grandiose sense of entitlement

and your outliers are emboldened, brazenly enriching themselves

by enslaving their fellow citizens.

A nation devoured on the pyre of self-interest.

Like a feeble-minded geriatric,

your memory has befogged your halcyon days

so that they lie shrouded in a mist of your own making.

Morality and ethics are but dreams,

once shimmering brightly in the darkness,

but forgotten on waking.

Once leaders of standing and character espoused equality

and the inalienable rights of all your countrymen and women,

regardless of race, colour and creed

to be granted "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".

Your Praetorian Guard protects the elite

from imagined threats and suspicion falls always

on the proud descendants of the Nubians.

The world recoils as you descend into an abyss

where theft triumphs over generosity,

crime flaunts itself in the face of the law,

rampant egos crush communities

and murder is committed with impunity.

Were you ever great, America,

or were you merely lucky?

One day even the best luck runs out.

Photo Credit: Andrew M. Bell