Day of Truth & Freedom

by Breckyn Forcey

They say cold can freeze a bone;

I think they’ve never felt a sorrow

So deep it chills the marrow.

Up here the wind sweeps glassless streets,

The sky a color you almost forget.

The color of waiting 

For sirens that never come.

Here, people march

With breath like steam trailing off their ribs,

Signs stitched with names

Of souls we were never meant to lose.

We shut down the coffee shops,

Closed the doors on school bells,

Shut our mouths and waited

For justice we can’t articulate

But feel like an organ gone missing.

There was a woman,

Someone with a name,

A life not meant for headlines,

Not meant for numbers

But for dinner tables and heartbreak.

They tell us it was procedure.

They tell us it was law.

They tell us to believe the only truth

That still fits inside a courtroom,

But we remember something heavier.

The way a body still falls even

When the world looks the other way.

So we gather,

Boots crunching frost,

Songs against sirens not yet wailing,

Clergy kneel in snow,

Arrested for prayer

Like it’s a threat.

We chant into the cold,

“ICE out of Minnesota,”

As if the name of it alone

Could unfreeze the things we lost.

In the streets they say

Today is a general strike,

No work, no school,

No shopping, no silence.

And for a moment

Our absence becomes presence.

The echo of all the voices

That matter most 

When they are gone.

We walk through downtown

And every step is a question,

Every breath an insistence

That we will not disappear

Just because no one looked hard enough.

I feel that sorrow

Like a room without windows,

A winter that never ends,

Until someone, somewhere,

Decides to break the quiet

And call it what it is.