13 June 2025

Seeing the ancestors (for Geoffrey Philp)

 Each tree is history in silent voice,
marking birth of small, and death of the great 
while bearing flower and fruit as marks of fate.
What we call “freedom”is no more than choice
of whether to keep quiet, or to outvoice 
the old captain, and the wise young first mate,
to make for closest harbor, and rejoice.
What’s hidden under soil no one now knows,
we want our past to be a place of pain.
We praise the ancestors, but not their might 
of patience, caution, and rage with hands on hoes,
and hands on cutlass, making it most plain
that while held in the dark they saw the light.

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