What I’ve been tryin to wrap my mind around,      (time) around,         (grind) around,              (spine) around

/ is / what I know of those wise warriors who came before, who were not sent out to a battlefield, but arose one morning to find war, await, outside their doorsteps. The mantle, these burdens passed on to us.

Cause see, lately, what I’ve been tryin to find,        underline,           remind,             define

/ was how it felt / the first morning our gaze met that stranger, the first morning we woke up in worry, the first mo(u)rning our sense of life wedded this specter, our fear of death, or at least this system’s constant prescriptions of it.

/ what / was it like the last morning we stretched our arms out cross and open over autonomy’s steady shoulders, the freedom of making a living within our own definitions of self. And how did it feel in those inaugural moments coming face to face with this throughline, thorough edge between what we must endure as the imposed limits of our personhood and what we know as our truth, the expansiveness of our always unbounded humanity.

Entrenched / at impasse / this familiar web between the responsibilities of our personhood that is (to grieve) (to get angry) (to mourn) (to long) (to endure) (to sometimes feel too burdened to move)

entrenched / at impasse / this familiar web between the responsibilities of our personhood and the requests of our humanity that is (to hope) (to dream) (to believe) (to be / always keeping on, always moving forward) –

But see, this knowing is at home within, this balance is our calling culled of blood and bone and spirit. It is the curse of a fractured people, it is the blessing of the beauty we’ve been able to unearth among such shatterings.

Cause see, we know what it’s like to hold lead-weighted emotions while staying loose enough to respond, to adapt, to keep care.

We know what it’s like one toe rooted in the natural the next tethered to its super, cause see we know what an immense and unceasing labor it is to care for the living.
We know our freedom is not only promised but waiting for us just beyond this gate.
We know all the tools we need, we already have within.

Cause see, we grew up hearing stories of the Africans who flew home.
The ones who rebelled, whether through methods spectacular or simplistic, thundering or quiet as nightfall, they were the ones we grew up dreaming to become, they are the ones always right here beside us.

See they knew when opposing forces understood the fields to take to the swamp, to braid seeds in their hair, figuring no matter where they landed on the other side of salt water’s infinite reflections they would be fed, nourished.

Always knowing despite today’s labor and pains, the sun would rise again tomorrow.

And now as we teeter towards balance along this fine-pointed line between showing up in our personhood and stepping up to our greater humanity, as we step into this knowing, let us say a prayer to our ancestors to remember always we have everything we need to get free. The mantle, this brilliance passed on to us.

Cause see, baby, they’ll have you out here thinking we defined by the margins when this whole time we been at the center, the heart. Cause, without us, there would be no here.

And this, this is love-work.

This, this is our work.

Cause see, by some miracle, some grace, some way, somehow despite facing the shadows of humanity’s greatest deprivations, we’ve come to know and embody its highest potentials.

If that ain’t magick I don’t know what is.

Now we might not be able to do it like how they did it but I’ma tell you what we can do, what we gone do, go on down to the water, we gon keep that same energy, baby, tonight, we gon meet in the woods.

 Cause see —

 we always knew we made magick, making homes out of nowhere and a way out of no way.

And I pray, as we teeter on this precipice of the end of the world as we know it, may we move with as little fear and as much love as possible between these gasping breaths.

May we spend this next chapter returning home, restoring right relationship with our glorious planet, our sacred communities, and the immense love, beauty and possibility of all that we are, will be, might become.

And as we wade through the waters shed from the most spectacular ruins of where we come from, may we always keep our eyes toward where we’re going, never losing sight of the possibility to witness and behold our belief in miracles, our power to reimagine and recreate, our responsibility to keep dreaming despite the nightmares surrounding us with the certainty that we shall overcome, we will build again. Anew. A world. Restored.