The War Never Ended — Poems Against Silence

The War Never Ended

By Breckyn Forcey

They told us the Civil War was sewn shut

With bayonets and signatures,

A neat surrender inked in gray and blue.

But I see the seams splitting,

Cotton threads unraveling

Into the asphalt of Petersburg,

Into the cracked sidewalks of Memphis,

Into the chants swelling outside courthouses

Where justice staggers blindfolded.

The battlefields were supposed to be

Museums by now,

But look closer:

The flags still wave,

Stitched with stars and stubborn grief.

Monuments tower like accusations,

Stone generals who never learned

That silence can kill louder than muskets.

They say Gettysburg was the turning point.

But tell me,

What turned, really,

If we are still marching in circles,

If freedom limps in handcuffs,

If classrooms double as trenches

Where children learn the sound of gunfire

Before they learn their own history?

What is emancipation

If the chains only change shape?

If freedom wears ankle monitors,

If ballots are barricaded,

If breathing itself

Is treated like a crime?

The empire eats itself,

Slow and steady,

Not with cannon fire,

But with laws disguised as nuetrality,

With textbooks that whisper

“Both sides”

As if chains

Were just an argument.

I am told to let the past rest,

To stop digging up graves.

But how can we bury

What keeps rising?

Ghosts in uniforms of every era,

Ghosts who tap us on the shoulder

And ask us plainly:

Will you finish the war we started?

And maybe the question isn’t theirs

But ours.

What does it mean to live in a country

That still argues over who counts as human?

What does it mean to pledge allegiance

To a flag that has covered so many coffins?

What does it mean to inherit a war

That was never won?

We are the unfinished sentence

Of a fractured nation.

We are the ink bleeding

Through the parchment.

We are the battlefield and the burial ground,

The promise and the breaking.

And until we learn to tell the truth

About where we come from,

Until we learn that healing

Is not silence, not forgetting,

But justice,

The Civil War will keep breathing

Through our streets.

Its smoke will rise from the cracks,

Its echoes will ring in the courtrooms,

Its blood will seep into the soil,