yearn for the best

by Douglas Hardman

Childhood daze

Baseball games

Sandy beach trips

Midnight neighborhood adventures

Trips that bore amusement

Aircraft carriers

And ash falling from the air

Screams silenced by fists

Sisters’ lives threatened

My mother broken

My spirit beaten

Sunshine and laughter

Concealed the dark clouds

But transparency is key

You cannot suppress

What shaped you

History is sugarcoated

Minus the Great Depression

(that one they got right)

Genocide masked with promise

Colonization rewarded with statues

Shackles transformed to cuffs

“Make peace, not war”

Against the backdrop of actual war

Shield their eyes

Make it easy to swallow

Since their jaw was broken by the fists of men incapable of empathy

Vicious cycles bore repeating

While we continue to glorify the glory days

Pessimism is a disease

It’s just hard to hard to see the upside

When my rose-colored glasses are bloodstained

But I lied before

Perspective is key

The past may haunt you

Knuckled down and afraid

I found it hard to yearn for the best

When I never knew what could be

Only what was

Now I know

I can yearn for the best

That has yet to be

Because nothing could be as bad

As what the past once did to me