In Memoriam (a sestina)

The land basked in peaceful autumn morning light
On the day the city streets were flooded with dust.
In a matter of hours our President spoke of war
while planning to pack up and ship off the mangled steel.
Evidence would be removed from the scene and the country
Leaving us to live with questions, anger, and fear.

Leaders learned long ago they could use our fear
To summon darkness in the midst of light.
For the sake, they said, of defending our country
our enemies would be forced to eat our dust.
Meanwhile, they used the demolished towers of steel
To take away our rights and rally our nation into war.

For seven years we have waged a war,
using vague threats of terrorism to propagate fear,
Now some people are asking, what about the steel?
Traces of Thermate® brought new questions to light
and how the towers collapsed into neat piles of dust…
Who benefitted? We must ask the leaders of this country.

We have been lied to by the leaders of this country
terrorism is not a tribe or nation that can be fought with war.
We ignore the slow deaths of the workers who breathed in the dust
but the immediate victims’ names have been abused to fuel our fear.
Nothing is truly free in the home of the brave, light,
While the media tells us lies about how jet fuel melted steel.

To make any change we must make our wills be like steel,
overturn the Patriot Act, and make this land the people's country.
We must have courage in the darkness and share the truth as light,
Otherwise we will find ourselves the next enemy in their war.
We must not let ourselves be imprisoned by our own fear;
we must realize that we can turn their empire into dust.

What would we have found, sifting through all the dust?
The souls of corpses recovered from concrete and steel,
did they die in vane? Would they wish for us to live in fear?
We must be the ones to redeem our country
From the horrors of this fabricated privatized war.
We must reignite the flame of freedom’s light.

If we fail to face our fear, if we keep mourning the clouds of dust
The terror infusing us will snuff out our light and our hearts will turn into steel.
We must fight to save our country, win back our freedoms, and end the war.