PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

The first flare was not of fireworks,

but of parchment set alight by thought—

a declaration flung across an empire’s spine,

words like embers: liberty, equality,

the grand gamble of self-rule.

That year, 1776, was not the start of a nation,

but the unfurling of an idea not tethered to land, but to longing.

They spoke of rights as though they were air and fire—

not privileges to be bartered, but birthright,

etched not in ink alone, but in the blood of dissent.

And yet—

what distance lies between then and now,

where cities blink through screens,

and history is retold in slogans half-remembered?

Where patriotism spills not from reflection but reflex,

and founding faiths are paraded like relics in the light,

but stored in shadow when inconvenient.

The erosion does not come all at once.

It drips, like rust leeching into the hull

of a vessel made for storm. It creeps,

as compromise becomes convenience,

and convenience, a creed.

Who remembers what the Fourth was for—

before it became a date marked in sale signs,

before the silence of civic rooms outgrew the noise of parades?

We are still passengers in that great unfinished sentence.

Still inheritors of an idea too bold to be claimed,

yet too fragile to be forgotten.

And if the door to its promise

has grown heavy on its hinges,

then perhaps the task

is not to mourn its closing—

but to place our shoulder to it,

and begin the opening again.

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