They weighed the poor in coins of grief,
And deemed us unworthy to be named.
A miner was worth the coal beneath;
His widow, less. His daughters, maimed.

A banker cooked the books, foreclosed our homes;
He paid a fine and kept his ocean view.
My cousin filed her taxes on her phone—
One decimal, misplaced. They took her too.

They told us work would lift us if we tried,
Then moved the factory to cheaper lands.
The owner’s grandson learned to sail, to ride—
Our grandkids learned to scrape with their hands.

They rewrote the textbook in a single night,
Replaced the inconvenient with the vague.
The students learned that everything’s alright—
The students who still asked became the plague.

I think of father, hands once proud and strong,
His laughter lost beneath the endless grind.
He said the gears would turn toward right, not wrong—
They stopped instead; the years grew cold and blind.

The refinery lit the sky each night;
The children here have asthma by age five.
The owners live one thousand miles from sight—
Their children’s lungs are pink, their yards alive.

They broke his door at dawn, took him in chains;
He filmed their trucks dumping poison off-site.
The tycoon walks free. He still remains
At galas, grinning, cufflinks catching light.

And this is how the silence settles in—
Not with a hand over mouth, but soft and slow.
We stop telling our children what has been.
They grow up thinking it’s all they’ll ever know.