You were the girl who read and read,
would rather sit with your book
in an out-of-the-way corner
and lose yourself in its pages
than join with the other kids’ chaos.

And from a very young age you found books
on Anne Frank and Corrie ten Boom
and continued for decades reading all you could find
about people who resisted fascists and
hid targeted neighbors to save them from
concentration camps even though it meant
they increased their own danger and
had less for their own families to eat.

And while these seemed important historical stories
to commit to memory, you had this sense–
which you now know to be false–
that there were safeguards to prevent such things
happening within your own country.
You were taught that we have guarantees to freedom,
checks on power,
enshrined in founding documents.

And now you watch, horrified,
as those perceived safeguards crumple
in a crush of supremacy, power-grabs, and executive orders.
Protections and information destroyed,
a clean sweep of dissenters,
planes falling from the sky,
people rounded up.
And you wish for the days you thought
this could never happen here.