Can historians pinpoint when
we forgot how to talk to each other?
It was long before “woke”
replaced “liberal” as slur word.
Terms flip like flopping fish
cut off from their kin,
stick with a persistent glue.

The division’s longer
than we want to admit,
pretending the Fifties were
a decade of peace and fellowship,
not a time of fear, when “communist”
was confused with “totalitarian”
and linked to one “evil empire.”

To this day I wonder
whether my independent-minded father,
to teach at the state collcge, signed
a loyalty oath he would have despised.