Our chanting, swallowed by the early hours,
we sang or tossed and turned
on rooftops, on marble floors, on cement
with exhilaration, with trepidation,
each ideal sculpted with determination;
stark, resolute, expansive
beneath a soft, black sky.
Days telescoped, one into the other;
into the boundless energy of inspiration
some nights the past arrived draped in foreign clothing,
on others, it came as an old friend
familiar as our own names.
We huddled together beneath the monument,
the freedom tower,
in the hallowed halls,
the square or the rotunda.
We shouted solidarity! or allah hu akbar!
treasured each new night as our last
and held fast as necessities dissolved
leaving us only a legacy
of imagination.
We shared what little we had,
cared for each other in the ways we knew,
took notes, videos, photographs
to prove that we were here,
and this is how it happened.
For those nights,
we were rewarded beyond belief.
For those nights,
we paid with our lives.
We invented a world without limits,
absorbed the strength of darkness,
haggard and puffy-eyed,
with all our plans laid bare,
we faced the sunrise,
and began again, we did not falter,
we did not sleep.
http://74.53.157.40/poets/1596
