As a poet I have to tell the truth; you say, “free speech is good for us all”

until I hit a nerve and you fear the fall.

Then my prose, my innocent rhymes are subversive lies,

To be attacked and ridiculed with outrageous cries.

Pretend that the things you see are just a tapestry,

A vision of history that will evolve into truth, such a travesty.

But thread by thread the pattern shows the ugly stain,

The hidden cost, the quiet ache, the nagging pain.

You’d rather frame it, hang it high, call it art,

Than let it pierce the fortress of your malignant heart.

For words are small, and yet they can split a stone,

They rattle kings that claim they are powerful on their own.

An uttered line can shake a marble hall,

A single verse can make an empire fall.

So call me reckless, brand me strange,

Say my metaphors are silly and out of range.

Dismiss the mirror that I raise,

Cloud the glass with smoke and falsehoods praise.

But silence is a heavier crime,

A slow eroding over time.

If poets bow to comfort’s reign,

Then truth will starve imprisoned by a gilded chain.

We are the ink that will not dry,

The inconvenient citizen just asking why.

The stubborn pulse beneath the page,

The living record of an age.

Not always welcome, rarely praised,

Often doubted, seldom on shoulders proudly raised

Yet still we speak, though our voices quake,

But silence will make our morals shake.

And when the chorus swells at last,

And future eyes review the past,

They’ll trace the lines we dared to write,

And see that someone called out the night.