What Still Stands

What Still Stands

A Trilogy Spoken by the People

Invocation

Let this be read without allegiance to power

and without fear of truth.

Let the words remember

what systems forget

and speak for what was never meant to be erased.

May this offering belong to the people—

the living, the grieving, the trying—

and return dignity to where it was denied.

Read slowly.

Breathe between lines.

This is not accusation alone—

it is remembrance.

A Country With Its Hand in Its Own Pocket

We were promised a house with many rooms,

but someone sold the doors

and kept the keys.

They wrapped the word freedom

around a ledger,

taught us to salute the sound of chains

if they jingled softly enough.

This country learned to smile in public

and steal in private.

It learned how to kneel for cameras

while standing on throats.

The laws are written in clean fonts,

but the ink is old blood.

Read closely and you’ll see it—

whose names are missing,

whose hands never touch consequence.

They told us, work harder,

as if exhaustion were a moral failure,

as if hunger were a character flaw,

as if poverty were not engineered

with surgical precision.

They call it order

when it only works for a few.

They call it justice

when it never arrives on time.

They call it opportunity

and then lock the gate behind them.

This country doesn’t collapse—

it extracts.

From the tired.

From the grieving.

From the hopeful ones who still believe

the rules are real.

It builds monuments to victories

it never shared

and graves for losses

it refuses to name.

We are taught to argue with each other

so we don’t notice

who keeps changing the rules mid-game.

They profit from our division,

then sell unity back to us

as a campaign slogan.

Still—

listen.

Beneath the noise, beneath the fraud,

there are people feeding strangers,

holding hands at hospital beds,

teaching children truth in whispers

so it doesn’t get confiscated.

The country may be corrupt,

but the people are not the same thing.

We are the unpaid conscience.

The unbought witness.

The quiet record of what actually happened

when history tries to edit itself.

And one day—

not loudly, not all at once—

the lies will run out of breath.

Because no empire survives

when the people remember

they were never meant to be owned.

We Are Still Here

We are not the headlines.

We are the hands beneath them.

We are the ones who learned to stretch a meal,

to make joy out of almost,

to pass shoes down hallways

like quiet prayers.

We did not inherit power—

we inherited each other.

They taught us to doubt our worth,

to measure life in productivity,

to confuse survival with failure.

But still, we show up—

with soup, with stories,

with a chair pulled close to grief.

We are the people who know

what a body costs to carry,

what love demands in real time,

what it means to stay

when leaving would be easier.

We speak in kitchens and break rooms,

in borrowed cars and church basements,

in group chats that say, you good?

and mean, I’ve got you.

Our economy is care.

Our currency is presence.

Our wealth is the way we remember names

long after the news forgets faces.

We have buried children

and still planted gardens.

We have lost homes

and still offered shelter.

We have been lied to, ignored, erased—

and yet, we learned how to listen.

We do not need permission to be human.

We do not need a system to tell us

what love looks like.

It looks like this:

staying.

Sharing.

Refusing to become what harmed us.

They call us small.

They call us naive.

They call us quiet.

But they are wrong.

We are not waiting for rescue.

We are practicing remembrance.

We are teaching the next generation

how to recognize truth by how it feels

in the body.

We are still here.

Not because the country saved us—

but because we saved each other.

What Still Stands

A country with its hand in its own pocket

counts profit while calling it progress.

We learned early how to read the fine print—

how the promise thinned,

how the doors narrowed,

how freedom became something you qualified for.

We saw the machinery.

The smiling theft.

The way exhaustion was repackaged as virtue

and mercy was priced out of reach.

But we were never only witnesses.

While the system extracted,

we exchanged.

While it divided,

we remembered names.

While it asked us to compete,

we passed the bread.

The country perfected forgetting.

The people practiced care.

We learned to live in the margins—

not because we were weak,

but because that’s where truth waits

when the center is bought.

We buried our dead without permission.

We celebrated life without sponsorship.

We taught each other how to stay human

in a structure that benefited from our disappearance.

They mistook our quiet for compliance.

They mistook our kindness for consent.

They mistook our patience for ignorance.

But patience is not amnesia.

Every shared meal,

every held hand,

every time we chose each other over the lie—

we were building something the system couldn’t tax.

This is not a revolution with banners.

It is a remembering with roots.

The country may keep its corrupt accounting.

We keep the record of what actually saved us.

When the lie collapses under its own weight,

what will remain is not the system

that failed to care—

but the people

who never stopped.

Sealing Vow

We will not become what broke us—we will become what carried us through.

Dedication

For the people who kept choosing each other when the system did not.

Closing Benediction

May you leave these words more rooted than enraged,

more connected than alone,

carrying forward the quiet knowledge

that what endured was never the lie—

it was the people.

— Flower InBloom

in witness, not authority