THERE

A place called THERE

Your there is not my there

And my there is not your there

When I get there I will know

When you get there you will know also

Yours is a place beyond the hills bound by a stream

Mine is a state, a mental state of peace and blessedness

When we get there

We will share

You will share the scars of your struggles fought and lost

And I will show the wounds of my struggles healed and scared

You will share the tales of the ages you hold dear

And I will share the tattletales of the gods I dared

You will speak of the echoes that made you cry

And I will share the sounds from the distance that reechoed my pain

You will tell of the nights that seemed like days and the dawns that begat dusks

And I will share the dreams of my days and the nightmares of my awakened sleeps

If we don't get there

Sing me a song

Sing me a lullaby to quench the desires of my minds 

To drench me in a slumber of forgetfulness

To make me remember not that I had a there in mind

To make me think that there is no there

For if I don't get there I don't want to know

For I want to believe that I have always been there

If we get there

We’ll speak of the struggles that made us cry

And the sadness that made us sigh

We'll sing of the victories of our day

And of the days that we were gay

We'll tell of the plentifulness of our hay

When we get there

We'll reach, reach and reach for our brethren hoping still 

To get there...            

Written by Joan Selorm Michaels (then Tsorhe) & Edited by Emmanuel Sackey, circa Feb 2016. This poem was written and performed at the International Students’s Party at Harvard Law.