How do you find a place to hold a pain that’s larger than your body?
Not knowing your heart could be bent that way
Be broken into a million shards of glass
How can you handle not knowing that your heart was made of glass?
How do you piece it back together when you never knew what it looked like?
You never got to see the picture on the box
No one saw it coming… the pain
But it came like a thief in the night
How do you reign in the anger?
The violation
The crime scene that will always be a crime scene
The hurt that will never be resolved or restored
How do we sleep knowing that hate found a home in our city?
In our sacred place
When do we stop hiding behind slogans and sayings?
Masking the stench of racism with perfume
Pretending it doesn’t stink
How can we heal that way?
Where do we go from here?
When do we get real about the Tale of Two Cities?
Can we be honest?
We were given a small slice of the pie and were told to survive
But even that has been taken from us leaving us with only each other
We look to one another for light
For an assuring look or a validating tear
For hope that things will change
That we will break free from the perpetual state of survival
From the fear of the red and blue lights
The grocery store, the church
The school, the playground
When does it end?
When do we get to stop fighting a battle that wasn’t ours to begin with?
We know we have power
But we long to feel the freedom of no longer carrying the weight of hate
A hate that never belonged to us
A hate that should never be welcomed or fed
But even that hate gets to feast while we travel through a food desert with our hands on 10 and 2
And though our hearts are tired, our feet will not grow weary
We will organize and strategize
Fighting for change until our very last breath following the lead of elders
Who have known for quite some time that change will never come but is there for the taking
We will take it
We will own what was gentrified for generations
We will walk through life without the bitterness of hate
We will plant seeds of promise and expectations watering them until they are too large for even us
We will find a place to hold a resolve that’s larger than our bodies
That runs deeper than any grave holding our ancestors
We will be honest about Buffalo and we will let that honesty guide us to that place we so long to be
To freedom
Jillian Hanesworth is Buffalo’s first Poet Laureate. To see more of her work, or support her efforts building free little libraries stocked with diverse stories in the East Side, visit jillthepoet.com.
