Calling on the Ancestors

We have been here before. Not this moment exactly, but one so deeply resonant of this moment that it feels achingly, eerily familiar.

We have rounded people up - Japanese Internment Camps, Native American Reservations - when we perceived their otherness a threat.

We have been here before. Many of us watched it happened. One of the things we can do is document. Write. Speak. Create.

An ancestor of mine, a woman who never married, never had children, and died young, was a poet and abolitionist. Her resistance was her pen, her words. Every poem she wrote decried the institution of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans. I decided she planted a seed for me, for us. I’ll use my digital pen to decry the treatment of immigrants, rounding them up, instilling fear in their hearts and bodies. They are not our enemies. Lack of compassion is. They are not our enemies. Fear is.

Without their hands, their bodies, my city would fall apart.

———

“Till they were torn by savage hands apart,

Fond arms from twining arms, and heart from heart,

Never to meet again! What had they done,

Thou tool of avarice and tyranny!”

~Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, 1807-1834