My country is not perfect

My country is not perfect.

It is not perfectly just, or perfectly safe, of perfectly governed.
Its streets are not perfectly clean,
Its roads are not perfectly straight,
Its laws are not perfectly followed,
Its dealings are not perfectly fair.

In fact, my country is rather ugly.

It has a ugly name,
(who puts an “x” in a name and pronounces it “j”?)
It has an ugly flag,
an ugly history,
an ugly set of scars — 
not unlike my own.

My country is not perfect, nor will it ever be perfect.
It has too much envy in its heart, too much greed,
Too much pain from too many disappointments,
Too much bigotry and self-loathing and snobbery.
It’s too addicted,
too mismanaged,
too insecure and afraid and cynical.
To ever become what it could be.
Could be.

No. My country is not perfect. 
But maybe it is.

Maybe one day when you stand on a filthy street corner
where a volcano fuming in the distance fills your eyes
and the intoxicating smell of freshly-made tortillas fills your lungs,

Or when you draw your eyes up from reading a newspaper
filled with enough injustice and vice to break your heart every day,
and, breathless, watch the sunset over the Pacific Ocean.

Maybe then you’ll understand
what it’s like to have a country so perfectly imperfect.
That hurts you when you leave it, and hurts you if you stay.

A land so blessed and so cursed,
A country so easy to forget and so hard to leave behind,
A home you want to be so proud of but can’t.