Poem:My Country (With Two Right Feet)

I wrote this poem in 2010.

In 2008 I voted for Obama from Sweden. I was watching my country from a distance and believed it was capable of expanding its own promise.

When I came home, the resistance was already in the White House. It wasn’t about policy. It was about his color. Reform was treated as intrusion before it had even began.

I heard people argue that the poor were a burden. That helping them was waste. That some lives were simply a loss.

Race moved through the conversation whether anyone named it or not.

This country has always contradicted itself. But it also attempted something radical — to extend respect beyond tribe and inheritance.

That attempt matters to me.

It was meant for everyone. I still believe that.

Marni Fraser

2026

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My Country (With Two Right Feet)

A country with two right feet

cannot keep its balance.

My country, ’tis of thee—

It advances toward injustice

with the confidence of certainty,

consuming generations not yet born.

From the eye of the pyramid

to chambers thinned by corporate hands,

power circulates in polished loops—

green, abundant, unashamed.

Below, the gathered poor

inherit the invoice.

They are instructed in the elegance of circular logic—

a system complete unto itself—

until the circle closes

and they are removed from it.

This nation refuses the middle.

Not left.

Not right.

But lurch.

The machine persists.

The media ignites on command—

language wired to detonate,

signal enthroned as substance,

tumult ratified as truth.

“For which it stands.”

Prediction fails.

Clarity thins.

The structure—once named Republic—

turns on uneven gears.

One side overdriven.

One side scarcely moving.

Its burden was never divinity.

Its burden was integrity.

Its death will not be partisan.

It will be structural.

A fall

executed

with two right feet.

Marni Fraser

2026

Lake Tahoe, 2013 by Marni Fraser