Sunday Sentence: Nebraska by Kwame Dawes

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

In truth, I have been reprimanded by my own guilt / for how easily have I silenced the noises of a world entering the terror of a dictatorship, / how I have pretended that in time it will pass—how I have carried in me the hope in / a constitution that says in another five years, the terrible order will change— / a kind of jubilee and yet I know that I am ignoring the bones scattered in the wake / of this horror, the deaths, the losses, the wounds, the debilitating wounds that will not heal; / how a generation of infants will have learned that the adults are allowed to sulk and scowl / in tantrums and no one is bold enough to do much about it—how the secret of the adult / is that we live in compromise each day, we seek our pleasures at the expense of others, / and this is enough for us as long as we remain silent.

from “Bones” in Nebraska by Kwame Dawes