The Rust on the Gilded Spire

It did not vanish with a single stroke,

no final curtain fell upon the stage.

Instead, the light just thinned, the promise broke

in silent increments, from age to age.

We built a cathedral out of hunger’s bones,

a sprawling skylight forged in deeper grey,

where once the bread lines stood like frozen stone

before the blue-print of a brighter day.

The ghost of it still lingers in the grit,

in hollow factories where the hammers slept,

in every porch-light that remains unlit,

and every secret that the prairie kept.

We were the giants with the iron hands,

who broke the chains and turned the blackened tide,

who brought the lightning to the darkened lands

and wore our victory with a holy pride.

But victory is a heavy, shifting thing;

it hardened into armor, then to a wall.

The very songs we taught the world to sing

became the sirens of our own slow fall.

We traded in the compass for the sword,

and called the hunger "order," called it "peace."

The liberators became the over-lord,

too blind to see the captive’s slow release.

Now, in the quiet of the dying light,

the American Century is a faded map.

We see our own reflection in the night,

caught in the very jaws we once did snap.

The elegy is not for what was lost,

but for the hands that held the fire so long—

until they forgot the warmth, and only knew the cost,

and turned the anthem to a conqueror’s song.

It lives in what remains: the restless dust,

the echo of a name we used to know,

the slow, persistent blooming of the rust

on iron dreams we planted long ago.

We now the villains of the world we made,

mourning the heroes we forgot to be,

watching the colors of "Old Glory" fade

into the gray of an unchartered sea.