In every harbor, salt clings to skin,

and mothers’ songs drift into dawn,

soft as mango fuzz,

warm as a sun-stroked shoulder.

Markets breathe with spice and voices,

stretching like rope bridges

over rivers carved from memory.

We gather fragments—

grief tasting of smoke and ash,

joy dripping like sugarcane juice,

hope folded into secret folds of light,

and stitch them into constellations,

mapping the body of our past.

The drum of ancestors beats

beneath cracked pavement,

beneath peeling paint,

in corners where children kick stones

and old men hurl words at the sky,

while walls whisper of promises broken,

funds vanished, laws bending under the 

weight of greed,

dust stirring on empty promises.

We are not strangers.

Your thirst mirrors my grandmother’s,

your hunger mirrors my mother’s,

your laughter echoes the lost songs

of fathers who crossed oceans

with nothing but seeds in their palms.

Togetherness is not a word.

It is the lifted hand,

the steady foot,

the heart that refuses to break

when night spreads its jaws,

when injustice prowls the streets

and the powerful turn away.

We reclaim stories they tried to erase,

bind wounds they tried to ignore,

plant gardens in ruins,

burn incense to mark our presence,

speak in tongues older than maps,

remember every footstep

that led us here.

If anyone asks where home is,

we point to the circle we sit in,

hands linked, eyes bright,

the same light mirrored in all of us—

defiant, awake, unbowed.

Here, there is no exile.

Here, only return.

Here, voices are rivers,

words are seeds,

silence is a bridge.

When the wind shakes the trees,

we rise—

alive, unbroken, incandescent together,

and the stars lean closer to listen.

We name the names,

call hidden truths into the light.

In the quiet, our shadows stretch—

long, unbroken, eternal.