Two lives
whose names read
like promises
the world failed to keep:
Good. Pretti.

What a bitter sermon
their deaths preach:
That goodness is no armour,
that beauty is not spared,
that loving your people
will cost your life.
A dark gospel
spelled out in their blood
on the streets of Minneapolis.

A healer and a poet,
forever bound
by the oldest story we know:
when a nation fractures,
it is those who bind us,
who tend our brokenness
and give us language
to name our fear,
and our future,
who fall first.

I wonder
how it is a nation heals,
how it even forces breath
back into its body,
when its healers
become wounds
split open
across the soul of a nation.

When the relentless,
senseless
staccato loss
of the very people born
to hold us together
hollows us out.

It will be the people –
the ordinary, extraordinary people –
who become the healing now,
gathering
finding
their own ragged beauty
and unyielding goodness
to persist
resist
insist
that fear
will not be the architect
of the future.

They stand in the cold
with nothing
but their breath
and their belief
that a nation is not built on power,
but on people
who refuse to fear
those without papers,
refuse to follow,
those without conscience.

They march forward
knowing,
however lost,
the nation’s soul
is not something to be located,
but something to be laboured for.
Not a relic,
a responsibility.
Not a treasure,
a task.
And they find it
in their own hands now.

There are no words
only will
to make possible
the ‘one day’ when
they will say
the soul of the nation,
wounded and waking,
was found again,
not in a museum,
or a vault,
or the rehearsed thunder
of a politician’s speech,
but in a mirror
in Minneapolis –
held up by the people
who refused to look away.