We did not offer our backs

Yet we became bridges nonetheless

On this strange journey

Along the margins

We were sudden avatars

The past to the present to all of the tomorrows

Were held within us

Until we kept the collective memories

Of cosmic shifts and ongoing injustice

A society that prides itself

On modernity, on adaptation, on the cutting edge

But those cuts are delivered

By dulled blades

While the wounds grow infected

In the face of denial

We are the bridges

And man walks upon us

In a journey that goes only back and forth

Progress is trapped in amber

Slowed and then frozen

As those bootsteps seek to break us down

Keep us in place

And praise the virtue of the silent victim

They built it all

Upon us

They hold it still in their grasp

Upon us

And we must finally rise

to shrug them off our breaking backs – Caroline A. Slee