Witnessing for a People

Agkabannuag:

let this come straight to you.
What you do is not yours now.
It is the same old way of doing things

done in raw truth and messy blood.
Not your work now, really so
but the work of our living ancestors

on your own young strong shoulders
that will go through the weight
of each day, passing and eternal

in the way you will look at it.
It is not a paved road, this
that we all go through, we

who have seen it all and now we cannot
sleep, we cannot rest, we cannot sit still.
For here, in this nowness, here is this

lonely sacrifice that is concrete:
our hours are no longer ours to own
our names are no longer ours to claim

our years are no longer ours to lean on
for the decades to come, sunshine
or no sunshine, rain or no rain

as in these times that we do not know
who we are, where we are going
when are we coming back to ourselves

our sense of self and the sense of our
bright moons and stars, their gleam of light
we could divine from the lines of stories

we write to make permanent what we remember
to draw from this memory the rare courage
to go on and move and fight, fight

for freedom as those what will make sense
for truths that are difficult but must be there
for the courage that we need to take the first step.


Hon, HI