This past weekend I was invited to be a part of new Mayor Danny Avula's inaugural Day of Service and Celebration. It was both humbling and thrilling to be able to share a poem  which I wrote for the occasion--and which expresses some of my concerns under the current federal administration, exhorting our local leaders to step up and, well... you can read the poem. 🙂 I received a lot of positive feedback after the event, and several requests for copies, so here it is! I was truly honored to be there on Saturday, y'all, and to be a witness to the testimonies of Dr. Avula and others from the community. It gives me hope. 

(As an aside, shoutout to the River City Poets crew at our Cafe Zata open mic on Friday, who let me test-drive the poem before it was even really finished. I appreciate you guys so much!)

Injunction

When they come for our security, 
let your energy be the currency too dear to waste, 
a sleepless tiger guarding the cave of our homes. 

When they come for our wildness, 
let the rhythm of your pulse lead a dance 
under an open sky with no end, 
where love flung like lightning 
sparks a chain of signal fires 
from the banks of the James 
to every single coast.

When they come for our children, 
let your fingers become as the stems of wildflowers 
picked from a lonely field by some five-year-old 
who carries them home, crushed in her fist, 
as proof that there is joy in the world. 
Do not let her let you go.

When they come for our freedom,
let the bright living flame of you 
be a wall against the darkness,
let the stardust of your breath 
be a wind that whistles up through the halls of your ribcage 
and out into the silence of fear, 
your words a lifeline of light, incandescent, 
onto which we can all grab hold

so that when they come for the least of us, 
banging on doors in the night,
breaking down doors in the night, 
smashing through doors between what is wrong, what is right
we may rise together: 
an ocean of voices, 
a wave with a power greater than armies.