A Very Special Poetry Prompt

for International Day of the World's Indigenous People

Photo by Andrew George on Unsplash

Friends,

Today, August 9th, is International Day of the World’s Indigenous People.

There is so much you can read about this online, especially from the United Nation’s website.

I’ll share a few videos with you, but I wanted to extend an invitation to anyone who’d like to engage today with a spirit of reflection, respect, and care toward the Indigenous peoples of the world.

Today, I invite you to write a poem with this prompt in mind, which is a quote from my book, Living Resistance:

Finding home is a revolutionary act.

I stretch back and forth

across a cyclical timeline

forever linking myself

to those who came before

and all those who come after.

I loop myself into their stories,

and I see myself reflected in their faces.

We are one, somehow, 

across spaces we cannot know

and may never understand.

The world around us expands and contracts

like a laborer, giving birth to 

every new reality, to every sliver of resilience.

We are because they were,

and they will be because we are.

Mother Earth teaches us to cycle in and out,

again and again, and we do, for her,

for us, for them, for

all the ones we cannot name

and all the ones we hope to meet one day

in a world beyond ours.

Finding home is revolution,

and the journeying back and forth,

the searching, the tending to the smallest

parts of us that long and hope and heal

is everything upon everything.

The journey cycles, we cycle, we remember,

we tend, and yes, every single day,

we start a revolution and a walk toward home.

Thank you for supporting The Liminality Journal. Thank you for leaning into this space with me, for reading my books, for asking really difficult questions, for paying attention not just to your own healing, but to what it takes for us to heal together.

Onward.