Tonight in Iraq, there is a race to rape little girls
before they can be raped by U.S. soldiers
Tonight in Iran, there is a missile aimed at the hill
where Hafiz cut pieces of his soul with a knife and wove them into a blanket to protect us
Tonight, my skin is the color of a hundred white flags
torn apart at the seams and sewn together into the body bag that holds her only son
And I am told God’s will is don.e

By hands that pan for gold in the bloodstreams of children
while a million souls are sold on the slave blocks of a pipeline
and a mother turns her bones into a bunker
fills her lungs with sand and cradles her baby daughter
until her own clavicle is blown to powder fine as the dust on a butterfly’s wing

But tonight there are no flowers
Every flashing red light is a heart threatening to quit
The moon is a tourniquet we will bleed through by morning
Is this your pursuit of happiness?

The casket as small as a music box
A mother holding that song to her ear
America, I dare to rest your holy water beside her tears
and see where Jesus chooses to walk
Heaven doesn’t know your name
Only the sound of you rolling your barrels of blood to its gates
thinking grace is something you can buy with Mohammed’s pulse
Tell me again how you intend to rescue their women
How you will teach them how to read
in the schools you have turned to prisons
How you will offer them doctors in the hospitals
you have burned with their children inside
Tell me how they won’t have to hide beneath their burqas
How you will wrap them in lace
Until they are all as conveniently rapeable
as women in the States
Do you know how much desert sand
is on the floor of the women’s shelter of my city?
Have you ever heard a skull crack on the kitchen sink?
Have you ever tried to blink the light back?
Do you know the man who beat her
had been ordered to fit five Afghani children
in a single body bag?
Is this your pursuit of happiness?

The orphanage you lit like a cigarette?
You cough and it sounds like screams
You cancel the soul with your holy flag
You dog-tagged your son,
Choke- chained his two years into eight,
and forgot his name.
When you couldn’t afford the gas to drive to his funeral .
Do you know how his family loved you?
Their trust was an orchard
Now tonight at their table nothing is alive but his empty chair
If you are a nation under God, how is hell so close to your prayers?
Do you see what you are pressing against your bones?
Bones cannot break
Into song
A mother can never find the right place to store an empty cradle
A mouth can never find the right shape to hold the lullabies it will never sing
America, if you could rip the pipelines from your throat,
if you could hang them like wind chimes from the battered night
would you remember how freedom rings?
Would you remember that every river is a lantern running without oil
and your children sing your anthems so proud
America.
The beautiful.

Remember?
When you melted the desert, the sand became a mirror
If you could stand so close the flames caught the lashes of your eyes
If you could memorize one face fading into smoke and never ever forget
If you could let one more soldier write his blood type on his boots
Would you let your pursuit of happiness steal so much God
from the heart that I know is still pounding
beneath your bloody hands?