The Promise of Freedom (by Rebecca Tutcher)

The drums have sounded in the empty sky

Where ash has bled from the wound of Time.

The war then began with our battle cry

And our Rights are here, just by our side.

The streets have lost the will to move,

The blood is now on our hands.

The world has stopped and we consume

The safety we risked for Freedom Land.

But safety came in a dangerous package

And we sought to unwrap that dreadful gift.

Knowing now it’s the cause of the wreckage,

But the mistake we made we can’t uplift.

The children now rest in silent coves,

Victims of our world they merely lived in.

Innocent numbers, murdered in droves,

As we fought for our right to kill them.

The drums have sounded in the empty sky

And ash burns red with the blood of the lost.

The lives we had sought to save now die

And Hope is gone, stolen by Fire and Frost.

Love is taken and horded for the prestigious few,

The others must simply want in their privacy.

We forbade them any peace and harmony too,

Instead we give them persecution and lunacy.

But the righteous are worth more than lesser men

And the benefits show their place in Freedom Land.

We rose up and took their Rights from them

And kept it held tightly in our worthy hand.

So they shrivel and die in their lack of love.

They wilt and we find from that satisfaction.

We are better, after all, an Eagle to a Dove,

And studiously ignore our own contradiction.

The drums have sounded in the empty sky

Their steady beat now too loud to stand.

Have we done it all, does the end draw nigh?

Have we sacrificed enough for Freedom Land?

No, we have our Rights and the passage was set,

Foregoing sanity for the blissful sense of Freedom.

Our women rose up, but now we forget

The ways in which regulations destroyed them.

A resounding echo of newborn cries

Sound in the fading daylight of memory.

Forced to be born while the mother dies,

Ignoring that conception was done criminally.

Oh, but at least they live, as only one can live

When one resides in a broken home.

At least they live and they have lives to give,

But what is living when we are all alone?

The drums have sounded in the empty sky

Their rhythm broken and dismally haunted.

The drums now beat with a sickening cry,

But, after all, isn’t this what we wanted?