Declaration

A Sonnet Sequence
For the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary, July 4, 2026


I. The Cause Declared

When in the course of nations and of men,
A people feels the ancient bindings strain,
It must not break in silence, nor again
Submit its wound to inkless years. The pen

Must name the cause, and make the cause be known,
Not for revenge, nor vanity, nor pride,
But so the watching world may stand beside
The truth that tyrants hoped to keep alone.

For separation is no small decree.
It asks of conscience what the heart can bear,
And turns a private grief to public air,
Where law and heaven judge what must be free.

So let the cause be spoken, hard and whole:
The first free act of a divided soul.


II. The Rights of Man

We hold that truth is not a crown’s award,
Nor granted by the favor of a king;
It lives before the bells of kingdoms ring,
Before the seals of parliament record.

All men are fashioned equal in their birth,
Not equal in their station, gold, or name,
But lit by one unpurchasable flame,
The common breath that dignifies the earth.

For life is not a loan from royal hands,
And liberty no privilege to sell;
The soul was never born for someone’s cell,
Nor joy confined by another’s commands.

Where government forgets why it was made,
The governed need not bless the lifted blade.


III. Consent

A government is built to guard, not own,
To serve the lives from which its powers rise;
Its highest law is written in the eyes
Of those who give it leave to wear the throne.

No power is just that rules by private will.
No edict becomes sacred through command.
Authority must answer to the hand
That shaped its charge and may revoke it still.

When law protects the weak against the strong,
The people shelter law with grateful trust;
But when the law is hammered into dust,
And right is made to kneel before the wrong,

Then power, severed from its people’s source,
Is law in name, but tyranny in force.


IV. Patience and Sufferance

Yet wisdom does not hurry to the sword.
Old houses are not torn for passing rain;
A people may endure familiar pain
Before it casts away a former lord.

For habit builds a homeland out of haze,
And even wrong, when old enough, seems fate;
Men learn to bow beneath a bending weight
And name their chains the order of their days.

But patience has a border and a cost.
Long suffering, when mocked by deeper chains,
Becomes the witness history retains
Of all that power spent and honor lost.

When every plea returns with harsher laws,
Endurance turns at last into a cause.


V. The Tyrant Named

Then let the charges gather, one by one,
Not whispered in the corners of the night,
But set before the world in common light,
As stones are counted underneath the sun.

He silenced every house that dared dissent,
And made the bench of justice bow his way;
He stationed soldiers where no battle lay,
And taxed their trade without their free consent.

He waged a war upon his own domain,
And loosed his officers to hunt them down;
Each plea for mercy hardened in the crown,
And every cry repaid in doubled pain.

A prince who makes a people’s hope his prey
Has forfeited the people’s right to stay.


VI. Petition

We asked as subjects still, with humble breath.
We wrote, appealed, reminded, warned, implored;
Yet every folded paper was ignored,
And every plea returned enlarged by death.

We called across the sea to kindred blood,
To those whose fathers knew our fathers’ names;
But justice cooled beneath imperial claims,
And kinship vanished in the rising flood.

What then remains when every bridge is burned,
When mercy has no ear and law no face,
When injury alone replies to grace,
And every loyal hope has been returned?

A people cannot kneel forever there
Before a throne that answers prayer with air.


VII. Separation

So now the word that trembled must be said:
These colonies are free by right and will.
The bond is broken, and the crown is still
A memory of allegiance, cold and dead.

No half-born freedom answers such a need.
No timid phrase can make a nation stand.
The severed tie must fall from every hand,
And independence ripen into deed.

To wage, to trade, to bargain, and to bind,
To make of peace and war their sovereign art,
A people must possess its public heart
And leave the rule of another realm behind.

Thus what was grievance enters history’s gate,
And wounded provinces become a state.


VIII. The Pledge

But freedom is no word the lips can spend
Without the body’s answer and the soul’s;
It asks for fortunes, families, and roles,
For all one has, and all one means to defend.

So hand to hand, beneath uncertain skies,
They pledged what mortal people rarely give:
Their lives, their honor, and the right to live
As something more than subjects in disguise.

No parchment won the future by itself.
No phrase alone could make a people brave.
The ink was only worthy of the grave
Because they set their names against their wealth.

And there the nation’s first hard music ran:
A free-born vow from mortal man to man.

Copyright © 2026 Robert Meyers-Lussier