Juneteenth

Remembrance

Two years late, the news arrived in Texas heat,

but freedom don’t apologize for taking its time

it just arrives, and changes everything.

We carry June the way water carries light:

unbothered by the years between then and now,

still moving, still finding ground.

My grandmother’s hands. My mother’s hymns.

This walk through Brooklyn that I call my own.

All of it inherited. None of it owed to silence.

So today I say the names that built the path:

Telfar. Aurora. Kerby. Christopher. Virgil. Theo.

Not because they need my remembering, but because remembering is how we stay free.