Traveling Light

We descended the hills,
  Walking down the slopes,
   Meandering
And skirted the border,
  The imposition and the scrutiny
For it was manifest that we controlled our own destiny

We stayed close to the land
  And paused to mark the signposts
These last barely disguised
  But concealed to all but the practiced eye
Our story would be imprinted in the wood,
  The dark matter of history

South of the river,
 We found shelter
  And crafted refreshments
Spirits were summoned for this,
 Our season of migration
And our songs, the sounds of freedom,
  A taste of welcome relief

Troubles may follow you
  But these borderlands were our sanctuary
The healing started as we crossed
  The bothersome boundaries
We took in the scale of these human monuments to fraught identity

Still, the lingering sense
  That others would be confronted with tiring demands
While, with our vocation, we evaded
  The tyranny of stamps on paper
Moving slowly, as we did,
  To the other side of the barriers,
We remembered why we traveled light

Borderlands, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Border by Gregory Isaacs
• Border Song (Holy Moses) by Aretha Franklin
• Traveling by Burning Spear
• The Line by D'Angelo
• Any River by Burning Spear
• Other Side of the Game by Erykah Badu
• I've Known Rivers by Gary Batz
• Kunta Kinte Dub by The Revolutionaries
  There's an energy to this dub paen to the spirit of the men in the hills who roam the borderlands.

Liminal, subsurface unseen.

See also: Until Such Time

File under: culture, observation, maroon, griots, sensory, poetry, toli

Writing log: April 5, 2022