Upon the shore, the sails unfurled—a shadow split the sand,
The Arawaks, open-handed, met the strangers on their land.
But steel and hunger answered gifts; the blade betrayed the hand,
And memory’s first encounter bled sorrow through the land.

The victors chisel chronicles, their glory set in stone,
Yet deep beneath the monuments, lost voices weep alone.
History’s map distorts the truth—its borders, blurred and planned;
The silenced and forgotten ones still haunt this stolen land.

A nation’s myth is mortared with the bones of those bereft,
Each monument to progress built on conquest and on theft.
Can gold and glory balance out the suffering and the pain,
Or does the ledger overflow with loss that can’t be named?

The color line, a scar across the centuries of blight,
Millions bound in bondage, stripped of dignity and right.
Yet whispers stoked resistance, hope burning out of sight,
Their courage, fierce and quiet, set darkened fields alight.

The poor and desperate, shipped away, indentured, whipped, and sold,
Their hunger turned to labor, their resistance crushed, controlled.
Class lines hardened—fortunes swelled as hope was overthrown,
The promise of equality a seed that’s never grown.

The memory of nations is not the memory you knew,
For nations are not families, nor interests shared by you.
The past is not a single tale, but conflict, clash, and strife,
A struggle for compassion in the shadowed halls of life.

If history is but a tool for those who hold the reigns,
Then every page that’s left unturned perpetuates the chains.
But hidden in the margins are the moments that resist,
The fugitive, the rebel, and the dreamers who persist.

To mourn the victims is not all, nor to condemn the strong,
But seek the fleeting moments when the powerless belonged.
In every age, a spark of justice flickers, faint but clear—
A lesson waits in listening, for those who choose to hear.

So let us read with skeptic’s eye, with empathy and doubt,
To find the threads of common cause that history leaves out.
For justice is not handed down, nor progress preordained—
It lives in acts of memory, in all that’s lost and gained.

And so the ledger closes—not with peace, but with a scream,
A continent’s inheritance: the violence of the dream.
Beneath our cities’ towers, the bones still shape the land,
And sorrow carves its memory where monuments now stand.

The silence of the vanished, the cries that went unheard,
Are buried in our language, in every history’s word.
Yet from the ash and shadow, a question will demand:
Who dares to claim the future, with blood upon your hand?