How to Speak to a Country that Pretends it Can't Hear You: 2026 Great Oak Poet Award Winner

Author: Milagros Lopez Secena

Speak to yourself like a coach, not a victim

like you’re teaching lightning how to remember its own name.

Tell your legs to rise even if they’re shaking,

because even earthquakes are just the earth deciding

It’s done staying still.

Tell your breath to stop apologizing for taking up space.

Tell your spine to stand like it’s tired of being borrowed.

Tell your fear it can sit in the backseat

You’re driving now,

And the road is finally listening.

Command your voice to return after years of being quiet

tell it the throat is no longer a cage,

It’s a cathedral built from every time you survived.

Every word you release

is stained‐glass fire bending light into truth.

Tell your silence it has served enough sentences.

Tell your whisper it is graduating into thunder.

Tell your doubt it can pack its bags

You’re done renting your power to hesitation.

Then turn to America

and demand it to explain the gap

between its anthem and its actions

how it sings like a promise

but behaves like a loophole,

how it shouts “freedom”

with a mouth still full of chains.

Ask it why its melody is brave

But its memory is selective,

Why its lyrics reach for heaven

while its policies drag certain people back to earth.

Tell this country to stop confusing peace with silence.

Silence is not peace

Silence is the chalk outline

around a conversation it never let live.

Silence is the bruise the country keeps calling “order.”

Silence is the lullaby sung to keep injustice asleep.

Silence is the museum where truth is displayed

but never touched.

Tell the flag to acknowledge the hands that stitched it

manos morenas, manos negras, manos callosas

hands that built the nation’s backbone

but were never allowed to stand tall beneath it.

Tell that flag:

You wave because we carried you.

Tell it to stop pretending the wind is the only thing

that ever lifted it.

Tell it cloth is not innocent

When history is sewn into it, it is loud.

Command the country to confront the history

It keeps sweeping under the rug

because rugs don’t bury anything,

They just teach dust how to wait

for its resurrection.

Tell America that truth is a tenant,

and it’s done paying rent for a room in the shadows.

Tell the nation that denial is a luxury

built on someone else’s suffering.

Tell the dream to stop skipping certain neighborhoods

Hope should not need a passport

to cross a street.

Tell opportunity to stop acting

like it has a favorite skin tone.

Tell justice to stop showing up late

and leaving early.

Tell Equality to stop sending postcards

instead of showing up in person.

Tell the powerful to stop mistaking patience for permission

Patience is a pause, not a pass.

Don’t confuse our quiet with surrender.

Don’t confuse our endurance with agreement.

Don’t confuse our survival with your success.

Tell them we are not waiting

We are gathering.

We are not calm

We are calculating.

We are not silent

We are sharpening.

Tell history to stop skipping the chapters

That makes it uncomfortable

growth never came from comfort,

only from the blistered truth

that refuses to stay buried.

Tell the past to stop dressing up

like it’s innocent.

Tell memory to stop editing itself

to protect the guilty.

Order the textbooks to stop whispering about oppression

la verdad no es porcelana;

it won’t break if you speak it loud.

Truth is a hammer,

and it’s tired of being wrapped in cotton.

Tell the curriculum to stop acting

Like justice is an elective.

Tell the lesson plans to stop tiptoeing

around the bones beneath the floorboards.

Tell the monuments to tell the whole story,

not the flattering one

stone should not lie

When blood remembers everything.

If a statue can stand tall,

So can the truth it’s been hiding.

Tell the marble to stop pretending

It doesn’t know who built it.

Tell the bronze to stop posing

Like it earned its pedestal.

Command the past to stop pretending it’s over.

Tell the archives to unlock their drawers

because buried stories don’t die,

they ferment,

they rise,

they come back with names sharp enough

to cut the silence open.

Tell the forgotten they are not forgotten.

Tell the erased they are not erased

They are simply waiting for the ink

to catch up to their existence.

And after you’ve commanded the country,

the flag,

the dream,

the past

turn back to yourself and say:

Rise again.

Rise louder.

Rise like your voice is the one thing

This nation cannot rewrite.

Rise like truth finally found its microphone.

Rise like the future is watching

and taking notes.

Rise because you are the chapter

history can’t skip anymore.

Rise because the world is finally learning

that your voice is not a guest

It is the architect.