… and fire, my spirit

for Latrelle Bright

      earth, my body
      water, my blood
      air, my breath
      and fire, my spirit

The Kind shall inherit the Earth.
Not the meek. That is a ruse for obedience.
Let there be fire in our hearts instead as we seek a world of kindness.
Let us reject the stories of enmity and submission we are repeatedly told.
Let us make stories of our own and tell one another the reality of the world,
    in person, in actual bodies and voices.
Our pains and joys, our hopes and despairs, our stubborn will,
shared with the same honesty, the same clarity of water,
    malleable, but unyielding.
When they come for us, they shall find in us the resilience of a river:
their jackboots shall leave no footprints on our Bright souls.

If I am to seek allegories of elements as a guide to our lives,
first and foremost I would wish to be
    mulch
from which shall blossom those who I love.
Such a meeting of rain and soil is worthy to strive toward,
taking turns being a source for each other to reach toward the sky
for the nourishment of sun and breath.
There you have an order, a personal order, perhaps,
of reaching, from water and earth, toward fire and air, yes,
    that oldest story we ever told one another since our ancestors first noticed
    the stubborn blooms reach toward the sun after a rain.

The inevitabilities we are told to believe to be immutable
—money, god, flag, poverty, boundaries on maps, and the anointed rich—
are all just stories.
A story with an army & a navy is not powerful if no one chooses to believe it.
There is power in such choice:
whom to believe and what to disbelieve together.
The stories we choose to share decide who we are.

If one storyteller has so profoundly changed so many of us,
you better believe that all of us together can change
everything.

Melih Sener