America. Home of the broken and the caged

Think back

To the first time you learned how to ride a bike

Your parents hands holding you up by your armpits, steadying you every step of the way until they weren’t

But the words, “I’m right here, you can do it!” Were repeated in your ear to calm your fears

Remember the first time you fell and scraped you knee?

The arms that held you?

The lips that pressed and like magic made the tears fade?

The way you feel to this day when your family tells you it’s all going to be okay?

Remember sleeping on a concrete floor

Caged behind bars and a locked door?

Remember the drugs that they gave you to keep you quiet

To calm the riot before it started?

When your captors took apart any family you had

And after taking your mom

Your dad

They took to raping everything else you had

Including friends as young as six years old

Then taping mouths shut with threats of abuse

And promises of never seeing your family again and the blame fell in your hands?

I didn’t think you would.

These aren’t childhood memories that anyone should have

And yet, it’s happening today.

In the land of the free and the brave

We’re holding families begging on their knees

Refugees we refuse to refuge running from a place they cannot call home anymore searching for rescue

Trying to save their children from being sold to the war

Only to wind up naked of everything they know at our door

And we turn a blind eye

Until their cries make their way to our shore, a mother desperate for her child’s safety

Only to be received as a criminal

Put under lock and key

Putting them in a different kind of war because “this is our home, we got here first.”

If home is where the heart is, America is no longer a home

I cannot see her heart.