[TW: Rape, Violence]

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 done

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 you 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 burkas

how you will wrap them in lace til they are all as conveniently rapable as women in the States

Do you know how much desert sand is on the floor of the women’s shelter in this city?

Have you ever heard a skull crack on a 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 between 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 windchimes 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

where 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? 

Watched this in class today. Best PSA ever.