Echoes of Injustice, a reverb.
Echoes of Injustice
Ambiguity in every thought
Penetrating skepticism with every touch
Eyes once spirited are now jaded
Optimism is replaced with vacuity
Like the quiet of an enemy coming upon
a soldier in the dark cover of night
Despoiled blade sliding silently out of
the resilient ornate sheath
Drawn with a sinister breath that echoes
the abandoned hopes stolen by this desert prison
The dominance of oblivion in everything seen but scarcely uttered for
fear that the stupor felt in denial will rear feelings contained
Releasing a rage that
will pour forth in a barrage of thunder
pounding down with a fragmenting wrath
Demolishing any innocuous entity in its woeful path
creating an abyss of desolation
Despondency on every face
Trepidation in every heart
Tears instantaneously dried by the crippling heat of a punishment unjust
The silent stalker creeps upon the weary soldier
who has battled an unmerited crusade
Jagged edge plunging into the unsuspecting back
With one malicious jab the soldier is laid to rest
and the echoes of injustice fade into the taciturn night.
Echoes, Answered
I wrote Echoes of Injustice when I was twenty-three years old, in a combat zone, when injustice still announced itself with sound and shape.
Back then, it arrived the way war teaches you to recognize danger: quietly, deliberately, with intent. A blade sliding free. A breath too close. A betrayal you could feel in your body before you could name it. Violence was personal. Fear was earned. The enemy had mass.
In that poem, injustice stalks. It creeps. It plunges. It ends a soldier with a single malicious jab, and then recedes into the taciturn night.
That version of injustice made sense to me.
What I didn’t yet understand is that injustice doesn’t disappear when the blade is sheathed. It evolves. It gets cleaner. Quieter. More polite. It trades the desert for conference rooms and the night for daylight. It stops needing ambush because it has permission.
At forty-five, I recognize the same pattern wearing different clothes. Same ostentatious false presentation.
There is no knife now. There is language.
No heat, just chill.
No silence, just noise engineered to obscure meaning.
The danger is no longer an enemy approaching from behind. It is a system moving forward without looking at who it’s stepping on, because it has decided that stepping is unavoidable.
At twenty-three, I feared denial because I believed suppressed truth would eventually explode.
At forty-five, I understand something worse: denial doesn’t always erupt. Sometimes it calcifies. Sometimes it becomes doctrine. Sometimes it becomes procedure.
The rage I wrote about then was explosive, thunderous, fragmenting.
The rage now is quieter. It hums. It corrodes. It’s what happens when people are asked to accept harm as normal because it is legal, authorized, or framed as necessary.
Back then, injustice felt like betrayal by a person.
Now it feels like betrayal by structure.
And that is harder to survive, because there is no single moment to point to and say, there. That’s when it happened. There is only accumulation. Policy layered on policy. Context stripped away in favor of efficiency. Human judgment replaced with process.
The soldier in that poem is laid to rest.
The injustice fades.
But the truth is, it didn’t fade. It migrated.
It moved from bodies to systems.
From singular acts to patterns.
From silence to spin.
I didn’t lose my optimism because I grew cynical. I lost it because I learned how thoroughly injustice can operate without raising its voice. How easily people can participate in harm while believing themselves reasonable. How often cruelty wears the mask of neutrality.
What has changed between then and now is not my sensitivity to injustice. It is my resolution.
At twenty-three, I wrote to survive it.
At forty-five, I write to name it. To transmute it into something just. To be a shield and sword for others who cannot defend themselves.
I don’t analyze single events anymore. I trace behaviors. I look for repetition. I look for what stays consistent when the details change. Because injustice, like trauma, leaves fingerprints. And once you know the pattern, you don’t need the whole story to recognize it.
The echoes never stopped.
I just learned how to listen without waiting for the blade.