The Return to Rain
         After Sandra Maria Esteves

When I speak to you of rain
I wish to say
Thank you

Thank you for your malleability
Raising us up from dust and seawater
Into the formation of human-shaped creatures
Filling us to the brim
Life-bringing
Life-giving
Life-sustaining
The waters of life

Moving through and around us
With us
Holding our memories and our ways
The ways of our ancestors
Waiting for recovery, renewal, and restoration of our spirits
Always available to us
If we but open our hearts and minds
Listen and receive

Each time the rains come
Let us bask, bathe, and swim in its glories
Grateful for the knowledge, truth, and hope
It brings

When I speak to you of rain
I wish to say
Thank you
For all it holds in abeyance
Until the time of our completion
When we come into ourselves again

Awaiting
Our return
To the old ways of seeing and knowing

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Borderless and Boundless
          After Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano

Borderless is the mind
Scouting the universe
Examining time
For all that life and destiny hold

No border separates
Mind and body
The mind knows what
The body needs
But is often aphasia
Or does it speak, and we forsake listening
The spirit ever-pursuing
Cohesion and balance

Boundless is the heart’s search
For love
Stepping beyond borders
Of fabricated and factitious lines of separation
And slipping through categories like water

Our mind
Our bodies
Our spirits
Our hearts
Solicit love
Petition for peace
Long for sanctuary
Trusting that we will arrive at a safe harbor
Where there are no more borders

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Each Other’s Business
       After Gwendolyn Brooks

We are each other's business
Each other’s harvest
Each other’s concerns
Even when we do not wish to be

Synthetically typecast by colonizers
Through the agency of color
We still rise from the same soil

We rise and fall together
Our ebb and flow
Our oscillations and our very vibrations
Move in consensus
Our fates forever intertwined and sealed

Locked into a communal history
And a common future
Indivisible
But always divided

Confronting new opportunities
To seek or return to a better country
A place worth inhabiting
And worth bringing children into

Can we successfully remove this yoke
Can we move this millstone of hate
Up a mountain of redemption
Or must we like Sisyphus be bound to
Watching it roll back down into the filth
Only to magnify our baser natures
And begin again
Over
And over