Poets in Unexpected Places |

Wring: the act of squeezing or twisting something; the art of wrestling, and reckoning, and teasing something out. What is freedom? An illusion? A glass of water? A table of spilled milk? A statue in the middle of a river and a passport, a birth certificate, the ability to walk outside a home – or have a home at all – without the fear of being discriminated against, oppressed, or shot? Or is it speaking truth on the steps of a national memorial, the “Birthplace of American Government,” in front of a statue of a country’s praised reverend of alleged freedom, under a ceiling of tattered American flags, aside the steps of a building that lives sandwiched between the New York Stock Exchange and The Trump Building on Wall Street, the birth of classism for all? I don’t know what freedom is. I know I am an American citizen, fifth-generation, fourth-generation-born. I know my...

What we now know about spaces is that they carry a resonance beyond perceptibility. What we also now know about public spaces is that we are in an ever changing dialogue with them. Perhaps we’ve learned that we must respect the air between us in those spaces. It seems the body remembers what we’ve tried to logic our way out of remembering: our interconnectedness that transcends time and thought. We try to honor and respect the spaces we inhabit and respect the spaces between us and if we show honor spaces the spaces bend and shrink between us. We become one. What I can tell you is that the Hawaiian people are cognizant of their relationship to space. I suppose that all island people show a particular depth of knowing the sacredness of space – at any point in time, land can shake and fissure, water can swallow you whole, air can snap spines and crack backs of bodies — the...

Let Freedom Wring

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