The Irony of Power

a poem by Roger B. Rueda You stand at the podium, your suit pressed, your tie neat, the weight of the room pressing back, all eyes trained on you, waiting for the doctrine you will preach. Your voice is measured, a slow, deliberate current, your words polished like stones worn smooth by repetition. They are the same words that have been spoken before— by men in suits, by hands that drew maps with no regard for the feet that walked them. You say the world must be fair. You say the strong must not prey on the weak, but the microphones tremble with the weight of your fleet, their engines still warm from another quiet conquest. You say peace, but the air is thick with salt, with tides that shift not by chance, but by the slow, steady push of iron and steel, of bodies unseen but never absent. The islands wait beneath you, their sand already disturbed, their borders slipping under the weight of hands that never belonged there. You say, major powers should not bully the weak, but the wind carries your words past fishing boats that no longer fish, past homes where mothers whisper to their children about what used to be theirs. You speak of fairness, but the maps have changed, their lines drawn in silence, their colors shifting in your favor. You speak of sovereignty, but the quiet is deceptive— not the quiet of peace, but the quiet of absence, of people moved, of footprints erased by the tide. You do not hear them. Or maybe you do, but you have learned that power is in the telling, that history belongs to the ones who write it, that resistance can be reduced to whispers if you are loud enough. It is easy to despise a thing when it is done to you. It is easy to call for justice when injustice no longer tips in your favor. You are not the first to stand in this room, to wear this suit, to look into these cameras and say the right words while doing the wrong things. You will not be the last. But power does not only weigh down the weak. It burdens the hands that wield it, too, and when the tides turn— as tides always do— when the maps are rewritten, when the next voice rises from the podium, steady, unshaken, with you in its crosshairs— perhaps then, you will understand the weight of your own lessons.