Fleeing upon dirtied feet,
Hands clutch tightly both each other and the fragments that remain.
A new home is built upon the remnants,
And a small suitcase of clothes and dreams,
Become what survives of one’s legacy.
The rest, stolen by merciless hands,
And swallowed upon a parched, insatiable tongue.
Young Jasmine flowers flourish upon their first fragrant bloom,
Only to be painfully wrenched upward and away by their roots.
The rest of the garden wilts, yearning in stillness,
Withering from the weight of despair.
Seeds spun long ago descended into the Earth,
The soil hugging them tightly to save them from a similar fate,
But roots must grow upward eventually.
Footsteps of those who fled upon trains,
Washed away in muddied puddles of blood.
Countless slaughtered but not forgotten.
We have lived in a land of plenty,
But we carry the stories of the fleeing–
Those who sprint toward an unknown future,
Chased by the looming specter of violence.
An uneasy void remains,
And the echo of something missing
Sinks like a stone deep within your chest,
Settling into an uneasy void,
Covered by a shadow of what was stolen.
Stories of colonization—
Spun and respun,
Told and retold,
Of land ripped away, dreams shattered
Of homes and families uprooted.
But still, we remember.
By raising the voices of those before us,
We honor their sacrifices.
We breathe life into the beginnings they fought so hard to forge.
The pain of colonization is rooted deeply within the Earth,
But from that soil, we grow.
Just like the most stubborn seed,
We persist,
And flourish into something new.
Division can come from these lines of separation.
Together, we sow seeds of justice with our fight for reparation.