We sit, staggered
Words with edges
The pen-cut of written history
Dove-tailed justification
Exalted as legacy building.
While beneath the ground
Of this once prairire nursery
Lay the bones and rot
Of so many broken promises.
The system that raised me
Did not have a language
For the relationality of wonder
How then do I express how
wrong it feels to see value
as only an economic proposition?
It lives beyond these words
Beyond the signs on lawns that
name this Settled space
as something that lasts.
It lives in the space
beyond this language, this story
In a millennia of thundering hooves
rumbling in my chest
In the slow, stone-song of glacier remnants
steadying my breath
In rippling remembrance of wind-borne seeds
tap rooting downwards
This is what endures.
Land. River. Sky.
And all the relationships
carried within.