You
look into their eyes
and see your children…
Brown. Black. Red. Yellow. White.
Candles lit
by the thousands
across the land,
even the redwoods are torches
to your memory.
The land scared and seared
with remembering the taking,
the greed,
the voracious hunger
of ghosts no longer remembered.
The touch of your heart
in the palm of our hands,
open.
With this breath
I am no longer me,
I am you
and the roar at the ocean
is but a thread of the sound of your light
that speeds through space and time
to pivot
and swell in the heat
that brings us to our knees.
Lea Goode-Harris
June 17, 2021
For the signing of the first Federal Holiday commemorating the abolition of slavery since the signing of Martin Luther King’s Day in 1983