Not Alone, Not Finished, Rise

Operation Hope
1

I think I might make the following poem the forward for my next book How to Rally Grassroots Parties to Win Elections, which I hope to be releasing this week.

Not Alone, Not Finished, Rise

You have fallen, will you get back up?
Not a stumble, not a mere misstep,
But the quiet tearing of your fabric,
The unravelling of a self once whole.
Did you hear it?
The delicate sound of ideals shredded,
Of purpose wrenched from your grasp,
Like a heart lost to the choking silence of history.

You have fallen,
But the fall was not only in the flesh.
It was in the soul, the mind, the very bone of you,
An ideological collapse,
The walls crumbling not from force,
But from neglect, from the weight of indifference,
From the cold hands of the indifferent power.

The fall was emotional,
A fracture not just of skin, but of spirit,
Where trust once lay,
Now only echoes whispering of betrayal.
Did you not hear them?
The ones who smiled as they tore you down,
Who whispered your name,
Not in reverence, but in mockery,
As if your every dream was a threat to their comfort,
Their little kingdoms of false certainty.

Do you not see it now?
The tribe, once familiar,
Now turned their backs,
Shifting, pointing, making you the other.
Not a voice of vision,
But a voice of danger,
A fire they wished to extinguish
Before it could burn away their ease.

And still you lie there,
Not dead, not finished,
But stopped,
For a moment, as if time had caught its breath,
The space between falling and rising
Stretching like a shadow over your heart.
Is this the end, then?
Or is it the pause before you rise again,
When the weight of the world shifts
And the power of those who knock you down
Is revealed for what it truly is,
An illusion?

You have fallen,
But this is not your end,
This is only the moment of stillness,
A breath held before the fight,
A space before the next chapter begins.

Do you understand how you were knocked down?
Not by accident, not by fate,
But by careful hands,
Invisible threads pulling tight,
Spinning your movements,
Tightening the noose of their design.
Do you see it now?
The slow twist of your body,
The soft shoving of your ideals to the side,
A fall, yes, but engineered,
Measured in their minds before you ever felt it.

It was the establishment, wasn’t it?
The cold, indifferent force,
The ones who smiled in the dark
While sharpening the knives of dismissal.
They trivialized you,
Made you nothing more than an eccentric,
A radical, an inconvenient truth,
The danger they could not bear to face.
Your ideas were threats,
They said, and so they painted you
With a brush thick with fear,
Spreading their myth of you as villain,
As chaos, as madness,
And your name, once noble,
Now spoken in hushed, wary tones.

2

And the tribe,
They turned their faces from you,
Marked you as the immoral other.
Their eyes hardened,
Not with the wisdom of their own hearts,
But with the weight of inherited hatred,
The heavy mantle of tradition
That binds their vision to a past that must never change.
They, too, knew not your heart,
But what they feared,
That the world you sought
Would cast aside their comforts,
Their rules, their boundaries.

The fall, then,
Was not your fault,
Not some failure of your own making,
It was the quiet collision of ideals,
The battle between progress and the structures
That fear progress’s light.
Your dreams were too large,
Too loud,
For their fragile walls,
So they pushed you down,
To make sure the world stayed still,
To make sure nothing changed.

Do you understand how you were knocked down?
Not by one hand,
But by many,
The cold hands of the establishment,
The trembling hands of the tribe,
All bound together in a single, silent act
To keep the world as it is,
And you,
The dreamer,
The challenger,
The one who dared to imagine otherwise,
Were nothing more than the cost of their comfort,
The price of their fear.

Do you understand how you were knocked down?
It was not a blow,
But a gesture,
A quiet nod exchanged behind glass doors,
A footnote added to a meeting,
A file closed before it was opened.
Your voice, too clear, too sharp,
Was muffled by laughter,
Dismissed with the dry cough of official tone,
Filed under “unsound,” “idealistic,” “not viable.”

They did not fear your violence,
But your vision.
They feared what you made them see,
A world beyond their walls,
Where power could not be hoarded
In backrooms and boardrooms,
Where status would not protect them
From the rising tide of conscience.

The establishment moved like a glacier,
Slow, cold, and inevitable,
Not crushing,
But grinding you to dust
Beneath the weight of precedent.
They painted you
With the brush of extremity,
“Radical,” they said,
“Dangerous,” they said,
As if justice were a weapon,
As if inclusion were a bomb
Ticking in the hands of the wrong people.

And the tribe, the smiling, nodding tribe,
They turned from you
With a practiced ease.
It was not hatred;
It was worse.
It was the silence
Of those who recognized you
And chose to look away.
They marked you with a brand
That burned but left no scar,
“The immoral other,” they whispered,
“The one who speaks too loudly,
The one who believes too much.”

They measured your worth
By your convenience to them.
When your words no longer served their comfort,
They placed you outside the circle,
Wrapped you in suspicion,
Bound you with shame
That was never yours to carry.

But this, this fall,
Was never yours alone.
It was the slow-motion collapse
Of a promise long deferred,
A tremor from the conflict
Between what the world could be
And what it is kept to be.
You were caught in the rift,
Torn by the tension
Of progress and preservation,
A scapegoat
For the discomfort
Of those who dare not dream
But fear those who do.

3

You,
Whose lofty ideals proposed a world
Woven not in dominance but in dignity,
Where borders bowed to compassion,
And voices, once choked in dust,
Could rise like incense
Toward a sky that did not choose sides,
You spoke of all peoples,
Not as rivals, but as mirrors,
Reflecting each other in the calm water
Of shared fate.

And for this,
They brought you down.

Not for your failures,
But for your clarity.
Not for your flaws,
But for your unwillingness
To bend the dream to fit the old blueprints.
You spoke of progress,
And progress is a mirror
In which the comfortable see themselves distorted,
Small, brittle, out of place.

Do you know why you were attacked
For these lofty ideals?
Because ideals unsettle the dust
On the ledgers of power.
Because a vision of justice
For all
Means subtraction
For some.

The establishment does not hate,
It categorizes.
And what it cannot categorize,
It quarantines.
What it cannot absorb,
It isolates.
What it cannot control,
It destroys,
Softly,
Gravely,
With bureaucratic grace.

And your dream,
A tapestry without the thread
Of dominion or hierarchy,
Was not merely unwelcome.
It was untranslatable
In the language of profit.

The cruel reality you stood against
Was not chaos,
But order.
The order of exclusion,
Of managed scarcity,
Of scripted lives
Where some are permitted meaning
And others are not.

And the tribe,
Faithful to its rituals,
Heard your words
As blasphemy.
They needed the enemy,
And you offered kinship.
They needed certainties,
And you offered questions.
They needed lines,
And you drew circles.

So they turned your name into warning,
Your hope into threat.
You were not just one voice,
You were possibility.
And they could not allow the future
To belong
To possibility.

The attack, then,
Was never personal.
It was the machine,
Correcting a fault.
It was the system,
Closing the breach.
You were the breach.
You were the breath
Of a world not yet born.
And that is why they
Could not let you stand.

Are you ready to get up,
And fight back?
Not with their teeth,
Not with the steel of their tongues
That slice meaning into compliance.
Not with the shadowed currency
Of fear and favour,
Not with the pointed silence
That guards their gates.

You have watched them,
Have you not?
Studied the rhythm of their tactics,
How they do not fight,
But absorb;
How they do not burn,
But smother.
How they turn dissent into spectacle,
And truth into trivia.
You have seen how they win
By making the dream
A parody of itself.

Now learn.
Not to become them,
But to undo them
With their own tools,
Wielded with hands
They cannot command.

Do not pick up
What they have thrown at you,
The stones of cynicism,
The armour of cruelty,
The bludgeon of hollow victory.
You are not here to replace them.
You are here to make them obsolete.

4

Are you prepared
To put down the weapons
Of your enemy?
To leave the poison
Where it fell,
And walk unarmed
Into the fire of what must come?
It is harder, this way.
It will feel like defeat.
But listen:
The true power was never theirs.

Find where your power comes from.
Not from conquest,
But from connection.
Not from fear,
But from fire.
The fire that does not consume
But illuminates,
That draws the circle
Not in chalk,
But in courage.

Rise,
Not as a shadow of the old order,
But as its undoing,
Not to rule,
But to reveal.
Let your ideals
Be your sword,
And your integrity
The shield no lie can pierce.

This fight is not a war.
It is a reckoning.
And you,
You are its herald,
If you will stand again.

Are you ready to work,
To share the light you carry
Not as a torch of triumph,
But as a candle offered
To hands grown cold in shadow?
This light was never yours to hoard.
It is not fire stolen from the gods,
But fire remembered,
A glow that lives
In the silent marrow of all who dream.

There are others,
Scattered like ashes in the wind of history,
Who wait not for a leader,
But for a mirror.
They do not seek salvation,
Only the courage to believe
That they are not alone
In longing for what must be.

Are you ready to speak again?
To say,
Not “follow,”
But “stand with me.”
To gather the weary,
The silenced,
The ones too often
Taught to bow their heads
And call it peace.

Togetherness is not a slogan.
It is labour.
It is the aching breath of shared struggle.
It is hands calloused not by combat,
But by the building of new ground
Where no old flag flies.

And you will need them,
Your brethren.
Not as ranks,
But as roots.
Not as soldiers,
But as witnesses,
Each carrying the fragment
Of a greater truth
That no single voice could hold alone.

Are you ready to stand fast
Against the machinery
That grinds the future into memory?
The establishment waits
With tools of distraction,
The tribe with tools of shame.
They have no power
But the one you surrender.
They win by division.
They rule by fatigue.
Their triumph is in your turning inward,
In your mistaking loneliness for defeat.

But if you resist,
If you gather and refuse to scatter,
If you speak not to overpower
But to awaken,
Then they lose.
Then you return
To the place they fear most:
The unbroken circle,
The unpurchased will,
The dream that moves
Even in silence.

It will be hard.
The way forward is not paved
But carved.
It will blister.
It will bleed.
And yet,
It is the only path
Where each step
Is a step away from the cages
That dressed themselves as homes.

So take up your labour.
Not with weapons,
But with words.
Not with banners,
But with bread.
Not to rule,
But to raise.

The work is long.
The hour is late.
But still
Democracy waits,
Not a throne,
But a maiden at the door,
Unarmed,
Unbought,
Unbowed,
Waiting for you
To bring the people home.

5

Have you figured out
How to light the fire again?
Not the blaze of conquest,
Not the torches raised in rage,
But the quiet fire
That smoulders in the marrow,
The ember passed from hand to hand,
Older than empire,
Quieter than kings.

It is not taught,
But remembered.
It is not commanded,
But awakened.
The fire does not begin with fury;
It begins with listening,
The still breath between words,
The soft nod of understanding
Before the first banner is raised.

And what is it,
This fire?
It is not yours.
It does not belong to a name
Or a flag
Or a faction.
It is the hunger
To be seen,
The ache
To be counted.
It is the stubborn, glowing belief
That people,
All people,
Were meant to speak
And not be silenced.

Do you see her now,
Waiting in the dark?
The fair maiden,
Not robed in gold,
But in the simple cloth
Of possibility.
Not a queen
But a question.
Not a command
But a calling.

Democracy.
Not the pageant
They sell at election time,
Not the stagecraft
Of sanctioned dissent,
Not the careful theatre
Where truth is hemmed
By polite applause.

No,
She is the light
That asks so much,
The light that sees too far.
She does not sit in palaces;
She walks the streets.
She knocks on forgotten doors
And names the invisible.
She weeps
When we forget each other,
And burns
When we remember.

You must choose.
There is no place left
To stand
That is not a line.
Shed the vestments of the old world,
Its thrones of ash,
Its altars to control.
Deny the tribe
That binds with fear.
Deny the establishment
That feeds on silence.

Stand instead in the wind,
Among the uncounted.
Speak where it is dangerous.
Listen where it is inconvenient.
Break the bread of hope
With those they call strangers.

Then the fire will come.
It will catch
Not in halls,
But in hearts.
It will rise
Not in conquest,
But in connection.
And the path forward
Will not be lit
By banners or bullets,
But by every voice
That refused
To go unheard.