The challenges of the past two years have changed the way we live, the way we work, and the way we show up for each other. They have also given us a rare chance to collectively reimagine our future. Through the Reimagine Seattle Storytelling Project we invite community members to reflect on their current experiences in Seattle, how they have been impacted by recent events, and their hopes for the future of our city.
If I had to reimagine Seattle, I would have to think about the land first. I would have to think about the first nation people who have protected and taken care of the land. Below all the pavement, below all the construction and tall buildings, there are all these stories.
I moved from Mexico thirteen years ago and, like so many immigrants, I felt a lack of belonging to Seattle. Immigrant mothers and immigrant women made me feel welcome here; Indigenous people and their fight for justice reminded me that, as a guest here, I have a social responsibility to this land and water; and a community of Black, Indigenous, and people of color writers reminded me that a better world is possible. As a writer and poet, the best way to reimagine is with poetry. As writer and activist, Jacqui Alexander asked, “What does it mean to be a refugee in a world on fire?” This question guides my writing. Can poetry become resistance in all languages and regions? I write with the land beneath my feet, the rainwater from the Coast Salish territory, and the air I breathe. Reimagining Seattle means remembering that poetry is a tool of solidarity. My pen and writings are and will always be at the service of my community in any language. Poetry is an action verb.
All the poems are Seattle-inspired.
On Storytelling
The small town by the west of the Pacific Ocean came down
with rare case of melancholy. The fishermen looked down at his feet and let go of all of the
salmon, looked down at their hands, and wonder if they ever served to build something.
In the houses, children stayed inside forgetting about the once upon a time stories they had
Nobody remembered the meaning of play,
No farmer was found near the land,
no seed planted in the soil.
How did they make medicine for the sick when they didn’t know the disease? People in the town wandered with eyes wide open and empty dreams. Finally on the third week of March during the heaviest rainfall of the month storytellers gathered the townspeople and cracked the earth open and begin naming the nameless, singing together an ancient chant of collective memory, an intergenerational braiding between children and elders so they will never forget again que son la cosecha de la tierra que los vio nacer, and they belong to the land.
People of the Whale, Sound of a prayer
All lands that touch all ancestors, Where firefly’s light migrate into a luminescent bay As the beauty of bodies belonging to nobody Are held in between braids, in the sound of a prayer
Where firefly’s light migrates into a luminescent bay People of the whale, stuck between seen and unseen Are held in between braids, in the sound of a prayer As if death is another metaphor for this life
People of the whale, stuck between seen and unseen All I hear is a Salish Sea calling us home As if death is another metaphor in this life Chasing us in this moment
All I hear is my mother calling me home As the beauty of bodies belonging to nobody Chasing us in this moment. In all lands that touch all ancestors
Breath all kinds of mingle Where I don’t know a holy bible but the palms of your hands And then you tell me I’m not her Are we forgetting the wars and flesh?
I don’t know a holy bible but the palm of your hands. So my bones don’t rattle my skin Are we forgetting the wars and flesh? All human blood is bound to ocean waters
And my bones don’t rattle my skin Don’t you feel it burning? All human blood is bound to ocean waters So tell us we are winning,
While this body is reborn again in the prayer of my grandmother.
Mirrors
When we look inward forced to face the Shadow-beast and the smoke mirror disappears in the forest or by the beach, at that moment we become rooted. When we understand our own mortality, but never crave lasting youth, when we become free from label addictions, there, by the shoreline we become infinite. When we open all the pathways in between us, retrieving all the lost photographs in the mountains or by the dessert, we become history. Now near the river, both feet deepen into the mud At the edge of decision here, we become migration.
