by Andy Monheit
They once called them Okies.
Now they call them illegals.
Different word, same wound—
a nation still learning how to speak human.
Once, the dust came for their farms.
Now, the fear comes at 4 a.m.
Black vans without license plates,
lights off like conscience,
bodies taken in silence
so the neighbors won’t see
what democracy does while it’s still half-asleep.
Children clutching backpacks as if fabric were salvation,
mothers praying in two languages,
hoping God is bilingual.
Fathers lined up in chains,
not because they harmed us—
but because they hoped in our direction.
They are flown not to freedom,
but to facilities so far from our gaze
that we can pretend they do not exist—
out of sight, out of rights.
Some call these places “detention centers.”
Let us call them what they are:
camps of forgetting.
And somewhere, a writer sits awake,
pen shaking like a candle in a storm,
wondering if truth still has a passport.
If language can still open a gate.
If poetry can still reach across the fences
we’ve wrapped around our empathy.
To bear witness is not a pastime—
it is a form of citizenship.
It is saying:
I will not let your existence be edited out.
I will not let bureaucracy bury your name.
I will not let history pretend
it did not see what happened here.
For dignity is not something we grant;
it is something we recognize.
It lives even in handcuffs.
It breathes even in concrete rooms
where the air tastes like waiting.
It survives even when a government
tries to deport hope itself.
So let us be the lanterns now,
lit in the long corridors of indifference.
Let us be the witnesses
who refuse to look away.
Because we are not the people of complacency.
We are the people who say:
No human is illegal.
No dream is a crime.
And no story of hope
Should ever end in chains.
Andy Monheit is a Davis resident
