This is the Place
Watercolor by Ali Brooks
This is the place
This is the place where
I understood magnolia trees
mirrored the beauty on my insides.
And taught me to relax into my roots.
This is the place where
we up-keep
escalators in public transit stations,
restrooms in public,
health care for all,
because we are in charge.
We’re running things ….
You and I,
your people,
my people,
we are bringing our
skills and wisdom
to
run
it
all.
What do we do with the cars,
the roads, the fields, the crops, the cows, the sky scrapers, the food, the books, the poems….?
This is that world that we get to figure out
how to live with,
how to be in,
visions to be had and solutions to be practiced.
We see solutions in the future our ancestors dreamed of
through us. (1)
This place is a place that each of us came from. A place of the spirit.
An Akashic place
An ancestors place
A universe place
A story place
A tarot place
A creator place
A god or goddess place
A Dreamtime place
A galaxy in the heart place
A visionary futurisms place
this unknown place
this changing place
this is the place.
This is that place where we feel whole.
Where medicine
is given when needed.
Where
the unique mechanics
and temples
of our bodies
are listened to, community held,
and fortified.
This is that place that only we can create.
It’s that place inside yourself where you journey to feel at home
and spotlight your reality
as a part of the planetary essence clothed sacred
by the teal, green, sienna seen from the moon.
This is the place where the lung
of the earth is being massaged
by a million dedicated healers.
Where we believe in our collective magic,
witness, heal,
don’t dispose of community, but actually
transform for justice.
Where genders
as broad and colorful as the cosmos
are loved on
waking up romanced
next to gender/body/sex positive lovers.
Where sexual malaise is only a story of the past,
which has danced
away across our bones
like wind in cotton curtains
set free.
This is the place where the vault of reparations
veined through hearts, handbags, accounts, and lands
has been valved open
and flowed through to new holders and decision makers
who take space to heal post-trauma and salve the soma.
This is the place where native land keepers
Teach global stewardship
and we all bale up the border wire to sweep clean
the oceans.
It is here where water is purified and kept running
for the rust belt,
detoxed of metals not meant for our buoyant minds.
It’s where the economy centers on the growth of the empaths gift
and meeting basic, beautiful needs.
Where children cannot be bombed.
Where a ceasefire happens now.
Where serendipitous moments snap open
the mirage of the mundane.
This is the present moment
pregnant with possibility.
Holding the potential energy of
A dreamscape so true
It dredges loneliness.
Sweetness not afraid of grit.
Truth not succumbed to convenient
liberation gently touched from the inside
cages shattered from the outside.
Stars in our hands.
Erotic depth in our moves.
A longed for bed we rise up from renewed (2)
to love it
together
here.
(1) From How to Survive the End of the World podcast episode “A Breathing Chorus with Alexis Pauline Gumbs” a conversation between adrienne maree brown, autumn brown interviewing alexis pauline gumbs who breaks down time travel with the example of Harriet Tubman.
(2) Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power — “A longed for bed we rise up from empowered.”
