A Place to Belong
A Place to Belong
This land, as foreign as the day my ancestors were dragged over.
No grand announcements or welcoming words met them as they settled into a place far inferior to their own.
Language stripped and piled up to the side like tribal garments torn from confused and afraid men, woman, boys and girls.
I’m sure they questioned,
Why am I here?
How did I get here?
Why have you brought me here?
Here?
You’ve violently forced their words right out of them, one lashing at a time
so they must have retreated into their minds,
when they ruled in a place, once called home.
A place in time before their children were stolen and sold
I’m just waiting for the time when you finally surrender and say we belong,
but we’ve waited long and those welcoming wagons still haven’t come.
Our brown skin has and still offends you.
But our children and grans have come behind us and the broken backs that we have endured gives them that right.
We pray for peace, yet you still want to fight.
It’s been too long, we long for a place to belong.
Feet, running past the loud and destructive explosions.
Hands lifted up in order to shield crying, terrorized faces from flying shrapnel.
There is nowhere to hide here.
There is no safe place here.
So we walk, we run, we move towards safety.
Our lives are worth fighting for.
So we walk,
we run, we keep going until our feed bleed and are numb
yet we still walk,
we run to the internal pull of a land that we’ve heard of called freedom.
We walk
We run
To a place where we can raise our daughters and our sons
We walk
we run
loosing the hungry, the tired, the sick along the way
the young,
still we walk
We run
Driven only by the sheer determination of quiet nights and freshly baked breads
No more bombs going off over our heads or drug lords pretending to be political officials depriving us of food
We walk
We run
With cracked voices, mustering up a song
We have finally made it to a place where we can finally belong
Our opposition is now, behind us all…
Access denied, who built this wall?
We’re tired, straining our voices, searching for the right song.
We sing in unity,
There has to be a place where brown people belong.
L.A. Holts
