America is holy ground now
christened with our blood, sweat and tears.
She is our mother, she is our daughter ripening
with promise and potential, weeping with inconsolable grief
as she sets the table, calls us in from the wilderness of our pain
with a song, a soaring voice clear as water,
stirring our hummingbird hearts with courage
for the long voyage to justice,
back to the garden defiled by greed, grown wild from neglect.
America is sacred ground now
beneath our marching feet, our restless feet
stomping, pacing, prowling for the way home,
the place where the soft caresses of mutual understanding bloom
with the sweet scent of forgiveness smudging away our nightmares,
doubts, the doubt that we belonged to America.
She is our flesh, our soul,
our leather and bone, feather and bells
drumming our hearts, we sing the future into being
with melodies of memory, for now,
we see with eyes of a deer, a child,
a feminine spirit as old as nature
the erotic irony binding the world.
We live for this sacred work/digging down deep/
so we can reach…higher
cleansing/unearthing a long buried
beauty, harvesting, midwifing a new century.
These bloody, nurturing days of dream unending
form our collective placenta, we shall bury it
within the spaces opened by broken hearts
to be born anew, to flower with organic logic into love.
–Adrian Murillo