They took down the Pride flag

at Stonewall,

the birthplace of belonging,

as if lowering a cloth

could lower a people.

As if a history that rose

from riot and refusal

could be dimmed,

could be drowned,

could be undone,

by stripping its colours from the sky.

She watched as it came down

and whispered:

How do you unraise history?

You don’t, he said.

You can’t lower a legacy

raised in revolution,

by those who planted their feet

in the street

not knowing

others would have to rise, again and again,

on the scaffolding of their courage.

Fifty-seven years on,

Stonewall stands again 

as a testament to what happens

when wall meets will,

when the thing meant to stop you

instead reveals who you are,

when the barrier before you

becomes smaller

than the fire within you.

Erasure is always personal.

No matter how small it starts,

its aim is vast:

it is the intimate violence

of pretending

we do not know

what we have already seen.

But the trouble with erasure

is that the erased

remember their history

with a fire no hand can smother;

the more you try

to erase a thing,

the more brightly it insists

on existing.

It has always been

a lesson in physics.

Push hard enough

on a people

and they become a force.