[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Hi, family.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Wow.
I feel the love.
Vision without execution is just a hallucination,
and I grew tired of pretending 
freedom was around the corner
when I never gave her my address or invited her over,
only longed for her company without 
dismantling my borders.
We are surrounded by multiplying fences,
chain link, white picket, barbed wire, electric.
A people made separate by fear, and income gaps, prison walls, highways, razor wire, and train tracks.
There's a gate being built around a community
who colonized a hilltop that was once a plantation,
once a ghetto, once a nation before natives
were fenced off in reservations.
There's a fortress being built around our imaginations.
They built up surveillance around our memory's
landscape because they're scared we'll escape
if we remember our daydreams are ancient.
They got minutemen ready to shoot down migrating
thoughts that might lead towards liberation,
or a legal hallucination of a world that exists
beyond the borders that they are.
Our histories been lost to forgetfulness,
erased by the frontiers of manifest destiny
as if destiny were manmade,
or manifested, hands of colonial planners who build their thrones atop the remains of nations
like gravestones.
Celebrate Columbus Day with clearance sales to buy up stuff to cover up that which cannot be bought or sold,
only stolen like breath, or life, or home,
or an entire people who once believed that land could never be owned.
And the ocean is worth more than gold, and
water cannot be held captive.
It will reshape even stone, and even when
the last tree stands alone,
it still makes a sound long after it's fallen
in a forest that lived even if no one saw it,
and fed the world its breath whether or not
we applauded.
One hand clapping sounds a lot like the rhythms we lost in generations who sang even as they departed.
And now, we stand at the doorway in the hallway.
Life brought us to this crossroads of loss,
hope, and undeniable promise
where we choose between past, beyond rightness or wrongness
that will lead to the brink of the planet's exhaustion
or the age of compassion where the meek become strongest, and reinherit the Earth, and redefine progress.
[APPLAUSE]
Give it up for Claudia Cuentas on the flute.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, family.
We're Climbing Poetree.
We're activists, organizers, educators, poets, musicians, and artists, and we're so happy to be with y'all.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
We recognize that our food system in this
nation has been built on stolen land and stolen labor,
and that to this day, the vast majority of our farmland
is controlled by the descendants of European colonizers, and that land continues
to be worked by a labor majority, Latinx-heritage people under no labor conditions,
and it's this system that is stripping of
nutrients, our food,
creating a system of food apartheid,
and also trashing the planet, a major driver
of climate change,
and we're so honored and humbled to be part of a growing movement
that spans rural and urban communities that's reclaiming our African
and indigenous ways of growing food, that stands to be the nexus of reversing climate change,
getting food to those who need it most,
[APPLAUSE]
and reclaiming our rightful place in the food system, and our right relationship to the soil.
[APPLAUSE]
[GUITAR MUSIC]
Every patch of Earth unencumbered by concrete,
where soil and atmosphere meet,
be a portal to presence, a terrain of remembrance,
a vote for survival in an unpromised future.
These gardens are blueprints of interdependent destiny, intergenerational memory,
Saving seeds for food as remedy.
See, my people know what it's like to eat
and still be starving,
so we're turning hardship into harvest, lawns
and schoolyards into gardens,
homegrown bounty in our palms.
We come from soil and stardust, and so we conjure,
giving props to hood magicians who grow provisions for our kitchens.
We smuggle spinach into prisons, transform the places that we live in,
trade psychosis for symbiosis, and stay focused.
Sprouts and flowers that tower on neighborhood blocks,
harvest raindrops on rooftops to water our crops,
propagate plant medicine for the metropolis,
guarding our plots 'cause our gardens are not for profit  or loss.
Cross pollinate the promise, fam. 
We got this.
Take a deep breath.
Restore calmness
with lemon balm bounty in our palms.
Sungold cherry tomatoes in our pockets,
sugar snap peas climbing a chain-link fence
in this oasis of reclamation.
We tend havens for justice and sustenance
amid glaring disparity.
Every seed saved will set us free.
In a time of opulence and scarcity, every
seed saved will set us free.
In a time of intensifying violence and climate calamity, every seed saved will set us free.
Hold on tight to the source. 
We have all that we need.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Joining us is our beloved friend, Jordi Rosales[ph].
[APPLAUSE]
And if you wanna talk to us, hang out with
us, we'll be right out front, right outside.
We wanna connect with you. 
We wanna talk with you.
We wanna share different strategies with you.
I love you.
[AUDIENCE RESPONDS]
I love you like we go way back, like our great-great-great grandmothers wove quilts together,
like our ancestors shared silverware,
like our angels, we're the same shade of black.
So when they whisper into the darkness to
kiss our faces, plant seeds in our fists,
Cointelpro don't see them coming.
I love you like sundown 'cause you bled fire
into the darkest hours,
survived the depth of the deepest water, 
kept coming back again.
Every breath you take is on time.
I've been waiting my whole life to find myself in you, you whose eyes count the syllables of stars,
catch raindrops in your palm before they fall.
You hold the questions to life's answers.
Every breath you make looks like mine,
and I wonder if God shaped us from the same clay, thought us up at the same time
'cause the lines on your hands, blueprint,
the cracks in the land, I trace to find you.
I love you. 
I love you.
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love
you, I love you.
I love you all the way in the back.
Yeah, you there by yourself, I love you back there.
Even if we haven't met yet, 
even if our footsteps never overlapped,
my happiness is anchored to your thread.
We are weaving in and out of each other's
breath, fed by the same sun.
I made up my mind to love you.
You who carries the moon in your smile, you with your ocean eyes, you with your deep Earth eyes,
you with your autumn eyes and snowflake palms cut perfection into the space carved out for your song.
I made up my mind to love you.
And if the captors, extractors, and war benefactors knew a love like ours,
they would go thirsty with their lives, and come to us for lost magic in their memory.
[APPLAUSE]
And we will feed them when they come to us
on their knees,
weighed down from weaponry, 
begging forgiveness and water.
We will share our medicine until they weep
at the resemblance of our faces.
They will remember our names, and their numbers will crumble to dust, bankrupt.
Their blood money will be as worthless as their guns.
[APPLAUSE]
And with time, our neverendings will rewrite
new beginnings
that start with imagine how free we can get
if, fill in that space.
Our words are the water, reshaping rock.
Our actions are sledgehammers to apartheid blocks.
Our dreams are the keys to prison guards' locks,
our consciousness, a collection of awakening thoughts
that decided one day to release all the fear we were taught, and give in to love,
unfiltered like sun to the dawn, 
unconditional mother to son,
unexpected, the enemy who put down his gun
against the command that hailed from above,
a peace prayer that shouts of thousands of drums.
The power of the people is the power of us.
[APPLAUSE]
