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“You’re nothing. You will always be nothing.”
That’s what they told me. That’s what they told me.
Nothing. Anything. The thing.
Not a person. Not a spirit. Not a core.
So, I sought to be somebody. Anybody. The body.
The gut, the heart, the mind.
The voice.
We were never voiceless.
You couldn’t, wouldn’t hear us.
Our tones against your eardrums were safe to be ignored till our war drums became more dangerous — — with more clarity and less distance.
Then, you had no other recourse other than taking our chapped hands and leading us to the tables in the rooms architects — our ancestors, built by your slaves.
The wooden legs absorbed our tears.
Our blood slid down brick outer walls.
Keeping us out. Keeping us in.
Now, from my cage, you wish me to be a songbird, the only songbird singing for a dying nation.
Hoping my notes can carry the coffins into a fire-promising rebirth but only offering ashes…so much gray in such a promised silver lined world. So much ash. So much dust. We return. We return.
Another bird. Another myth to believe.
We lose our gods with our angels.
And, we believe in a phoenix holding all of us under her wings. We are not the foundation. We are not a united nation. We are just the wind and movement holding our collective dream of this phoenix, a figure designing and escaping from our ashes.
We mean nothing to her until we are all gone again.
Nothing. Nobody.
So, we cling.
Our voice is lost to clouds and cold, cold suns.
Our freedom is no longer in question.
Still, we continue to ask,
“What does justice look like?”
Amid, the abstract subtracting the fathers and the brothers.
Amid, the contract subtracting the mothers and the sisters.
Justice loses color. Lover loses heat.
They want me to say something, be somebody, the world will listen to.
The world will listen to.
After all this time. After all this time.
The systems of life and politic murders the elders.
Burned villages dead canopies cannot shadow and nurture our child.
I am an elder now.
You are my children.
Does hierarchy mean anything in sharing knowledge?
What may I tell you?
What do you already know?
You know their history. Do you know your legacy?
Do you know the wishes of those who loved and fought you into existence? What they wished for you on stars twinkling but long gone? Like they appear long gone to you? Do you know they live in you?
Hope embodied.
The gut, the heart, the mind.
The voice.
Of a movement. Of an evolution.
The phoenix soar.
Rising to conclusion?
It begins again.
A pendulum pretending to be a mountain.
Climbing one way ends in climbing the other.
Balancing, balancing, till there’s nothing but still middle.
Iteration until no more irritation rattling anxious anticipation of what tomorrow holds you down letting bare knuckled boot straps slip into the noose making chapped hands whose wrists, arms, shoulders, necks, faces we cannot see past ourselves — boundaries between victim and predator are thicker than their mutual grasps.
Yes, dear children, you are not new. You are as old as the dust settling from the last big bang. Dusty embryo shaking off eternity’s pebbles to see yourself in an ancient mirror.
As you no longer need me to be your root, I uproot to finish my destiny as a tumbleweed explosion burning through the desert showing insignificant sand crystals my secrets of what justice looks like from her womb’s wet warmth much like the cactus desert, much like the cactus desert.
Millions of insignificant sand crystals.
They will look to me today, just a lone tumbleweed, for an answer.
An answer with no question?
How do I face them?
I was never the forehead, eyes, nose, lips, or chin — I was the faceless, crowded, chanted answer to the calls.
I am.
The gut, the heart, the mind.
The voice?
How can I now be the author of something so important?
An invitation to a movement, an evolution?
An invitation to love.
Not the easy kind whispered across pillows or oceans.
But, the kind witnessed in the eyes of the dying for a place they are forgetting.
Children, what am I forgetting as I forget my place… as I reach for one on the platform — off the pedestal of the anonymous — into the light of the ridicule — out of the safety of the minuscule.
What am I forgetting?
Hope, faith, charity — I keep them as my pocket watch and compass.
Always chasing time and paths.
Somehow I am here. Here with you.
Children, you are the miracles of now.
You break the wisdom from our guts.
You rip our pride from our hearts.
You are the strategy from our minds.
You are the symphony.
The wall of symphony.
May you see yourself clearly in your ancient mirror which has always been our eyes on you.
You were always someone — even just someone’s secret — even your own secret.
The phoenix remembers her flight in you as you continue her rise.
The Universe remembers her birth from nothingness as she watches your movement, your evolution.
It’s alarming how beginnings and endings happen so quickly here. This alarm lasts only for one heartbeat. This moment lasts only for one heartbeat.
When the phoenix tail stills like pendulum tail creating the meridian of peace, will I be there? Will healing start?
The non-movement of particles — Freeze. Will we be frozen away from those we hate?
Glaciers of emotional disconnect waiting for climate change, for bombs to drop, for nothing to matter?
Oceans rise, dinosaurs fall, the phoenix and the pendulum stop no longer striking a new day for us all.
Maybe in this time of rest, this needed rest. We can learn our best and see it through others ice. Polarity begins to melt. The freeze is no longer felt.
We see in the reflection of the ice and blurred but getting more sharp through the shards…
One people. One spirit. One core.
One gut. One heart. One mind.
One voice.
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