What Will You Do With the Flame?

Sometimes, a country forgets the weight of its own name.

Forgets the hands that built it,
the blood that sealed its soil,
the voices that cracked like dry earth
demanding something better.

Sometimes, history stirs in its grave.

Not as a whisper, not as a warning,
but as the slow, rolling thunder
of something coming again.

A woman stands in the doorway,
the light catching the fear in her eyes.
A man at her side, hand curled into a f!st—
not for v!olence, but for holding, for keeping,
for something solid as the ground beneath them
that does not feel solid anymore.

It was like this once—

when colonies turned to revolut!on,
when brother took up arms against brother,
when the world set itself on f!re,
hoping the smoke would write a new future in the sky.

And now—

it is like this again.

The papers that held the country together
are fading under hands that twist law into chains,
that break truth like brittle bone.

Democracy turns fragile in the mouth of those
who would swallow it whole.

Outside, the streets hum with unease.

A silence that is not peace,
but the hush before the march begins.

The past is speaking.

It is the rattle of chains breaking,
the ring of a hammer against steel,
the footsteps of those who stood where we now stand—

on the edge of something vast, something dangerous,
something waiting to be decided.

Do not wait.

Do not let them carve your silence into consent.

Do not let them turn your country into a graveyard of its own making.

Do not let history whisper your name in sorrow
when it could have sung it in victory.

The f!re has already been lit.

The only question now—

is what you will do with the flame.

©️Tara Shannon