We are lost in a deafening part of history -
where truth is but a rumor that limps across broken glass,
and every promise arrives already bleeding.
Men in pressed suits redraw the borders of a stranger’s breath,
their hands clean, their signatures and pockets not so much.
At best, they speak in polished vowels
while cities collapse across our country and the globe,
like tired lungs beneath the weight of a foreign flag.
Children learn the language of sirens before lullabies.
They know the geometry of rubble -
how corners can cut skin,
how ceilings can betray their duties mid-sentence.
The news hums like a fever that won’t break.
Every hour, a new cruelty dressed up as necessity.
Every screen, a mirror that refuses to blink.
We scroll past grief and tragedy
like it’s a ten-day weather forecast.
While spineless leaders smile with their teeth
and calculate their ambushes in silence,
trading futures like cards in a dimly lit room,
stacking the deck with green bones
that no one can lay claim to in the end.
And the wars -
not just the ones with tanks and ash,
but the quieter ones,
fought in courtrooms, classrooms, hospital beds,
where dignity is rationed,
and mercy is taxed.
We are told this is order.
We are told this is the cost.
We are told to be patient,
as if time itself were not complicit now.
And still -
somewhere, a mother braids her daughter’s hair as if morning is guaranteed.
And somewhere, a man plants seeds in soil
whose shade will know better centuries.
I have seen hands reach across divides
to show maps they insist are permanent,
until, of course, their nature changes again.
And they become cartographers with knives,
trimming the world and reshaping the geopolitical landscape
to fit their hunger with no horizon.
— —
I have heard laughter slip through checkpoints,
unsearched and unafraid.
Maybe that’s the smallest rebellion -
no shouting or making fires,
but the quiet refusal to forget
what we are capable of becoming,
or where we came from.
Because we were all strangers in a strange land at some point.
So when my students ask me,
“Teacher, are we lost?”
I don’t say yes or no.
Because I have walked long enough in this darkness to know it is not endless.
And while I will not tell you exactly who I am,
or how or when
this tired spool will unthread -
I will end by confidently telling you this:
I have seen the way people look at each other
when no one is watching or recording.
And I am not done believing in the trade winds
carrying us home,
wherever we roam.