70
Share on bsky
I wrote this poem as a companion piece to “I Weep for America,” which was published in January 2025.
Rather than document events, this piece bears witness to gaslighting and the human cost hidden beneath euphemism and repetition.
This isn’t about ideology. It’s about truth and what it requires of us to keep seeing.
One year later,
and the sky has learned
to lie convincingly.
Midday arrives
without warmth,
without explanation,
light diminished to compliance,
silence recast as order.
The snow looks clean,
this is how they sell it
as if erasure were purity,
as if forgetting were mercy.
The lake remains frozen,
a great unspoken sentence,
held in place by repetition
say it often enough
and it becomes weather.
Bare trees line the horizon,
still standing,
still watching,
still accused of exaggeration
for remembering what they saw.
There is a bench
facing the water.
Empty again.
It knows the shape of absence,
how quickly
a body becomes a rumor.
We were told it wasn’t happening.
Then told it was necessary.
Then told we misunderstood
what our own eyes had seen.
Language inverted itself.
Cruelty wore efficiency’s mask.
Lies called themselves policy.
Propaganda learned to speak
in a calm voice.
And still
names surfaced,
because names always do.
Alex Pretti.
Renee Good.
Not slogans.
Not footnotes.
Human beings whose names refuse
to be smoothed into history,
whose memory does not consent
to disappearance.
Say their names
and the ice fractures slightly.
Say their names
and the lake remembers
it was once alive.
This is how gaslighting fails
not with shouting,
but with insistence
on what was felt,
what was lost,
what still aches.
Orwell warned us
of a time
where truth dissolves
under pressure.
He forgot one thing
Even frozen water remembers
how to move.
Even now,
beneath sanctioned silence,
grief circulates.
Witness persists.
And so do we
one year later,
refusing the comfort of forgetting,
refusing the lie
that this is normal.
The snow still knows.
So do we.
~
author: Grayce McCormick
Image: Author's own
Editor: Nicole Cameron
Read 0 comments and reply