They say a journey of a thousand miles
Begins with a single step.
But I was told to follow the ghosts of my fathers,
Only to find the trail erased by wind,
Leaving nothing but dust clouds and hollow horizons.
Where are the marks I was meant to track?
The trails that lead to a life well-lived?
It seems they left me behind to starve,
Mapping a world they had already consumed.
I am a child who begged for guidance,
Waiting to be taught how to walk, then run,
Then plunder the golden fields of corn and wheat.
But now that my legs are strong—
Now that I have finally learned to sprint—
I find the earth is barren. Where is the harvest?
I see now: I have been cheated.
My leaders coined me out of my own blood.
They swallowed the future whole,
Stuffed their storehouses, their wives, their kin,
Until the silos were empty and the soil was gray
.
As I lie here in the wreckage of their greed,
I know the old reign must end.
I need a hand to paint my future in staring gold,
But I wonder: in a land of thieves,
Is there anyone left for the job?
AUTHOR'S SIGHT :
This poem did not come just from a place of observation, it came from the marrow of my bones.
I wrote these lines because I am tired of looking for footprints in a desert that was once a garden. There is a specific, sharp kind of betrayal that occurs when you realize the people you were taught to revere the "fathers" and "leaders" did not build a foundation for you. Instead, they used the foundation as fuel for their own fires.
When I speak of the pain in these stanzas, I am speaking of the exhaustion of a runner who arrives at the finish line only to find the prize has been stolen. It is the abandonment of being handed a map to a world that no longer exists.
To my readers who feel this same weight: I see you. We were told to wait our turn, to learn the ways of the world, and to prepare for the harvest. But we have inherited a gray soil and empty lands. This poem is my way of standing in the wreckage of their greed and asking the question we are all thinking: How do we paint a future when they have stolen all the gold?
I hope that in these words, you find your own frustration mirrored and perhaps, in that shared recognition, we find the first spark of something new.