By Eliza Moore in the KidSpirit Human Dignity issue.

We walk with it.
Backs straight and eyes fixed to the air,
As if receiving some great knowledge that can only be found
In the shallows of the swelling sky.

There is music in us.
An old, viscous longing to go back to the beginning,
When we were young
and indistinguishable from the promises of earth.

Now, new walls shudder into being,
Rising and choking.
They blind us with masks forged from uncertainty,
The root of desires long suppressed.

Some of us move with arms outstretched,
Feeling for the presence of other shadows in the dark.
When we find each other,
We pull back the curtain of differences
like strings of candy-colored beads,
And see clearly.

We find we are the same.
Made of a luminescence, throbbing and pulsing,
Calling out for the vulnerable,
The recognition of history,
The serpent of memory writhing in our veins.

We walk with it.
Dignity.
All the walls crumble to the ground
And we are not afraid.

When she wrote this poem, Eliza Moore was a 13-year-old eighth grader at The Center for Creative Arts in Chattanooga, Tennessee. At the time, she loved reading, writing, and visiting the ocean.


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