America
It is called mei guo in my mother’s tongue
It means beautiful country
What my mother and father,
And what their mothers and fathers
dreamed of
The endless promise of tomorrow
Freedom. Opportunity.
A better life.
Anything was possible.
It was the hope that came with every morning,
no matter how difficult the day
A beautiful dream for a beautiful country.

My family back home cannot say it anymore—
not without a bit of irony
What’s beautiful about you now?
Riots, protests, domestic terror.
Injustice, brutality, shootings in schools.
A man-child unfit to bridle his tongue,
Much less be the voice of a nation.
The depressed, the drug-ridden,
The lonely and the damned.

The damned.
The damned.
The damned.

The mascara runs across the cheeks
The tears—they are silent and loud and unrelenting.
What’s beautiful about you now?

It’s the pain, I say, because to feel it
means we are still alive.
It’s the courage to stand up and not back down
Even when we fall, even when it hurts,
The beautiful children of this beautiful country
will find a way.

We will come back in the morning,
with the promise of our foreign mothers and fathers
All of us white, black, yellow, brown
and everything in between
To patch up the tattered ol' red, white, and blue
Because of our belief in the endless promise,
That today will be better than the day before it,
We will find a way to see it through.