TRANSCRIPT

I’m Diannely Antigua, and this is The Slowdown.

Juneteenth marks the day when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, were informed of their freedom. It was June 19, 1865, more than two years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. To receive that news meant hearing that their lives, finally, were their own.

Freedom is not only a legal condition. It is bodily and spiritual. It is the right to move through the world without asking permission to exist. It is the right to rest, to gather, to love, to make a life, and to be recognized as fully human.

I keep thinking that freedom is as radical as birth. A baby enters the world with no documents, no explanation, no proof of belonging. A body arrives before language can claim it. A new life arrives before any system can measure it, before anyone asks who we are or where we come from. At that arrival we live in that first truth: We are here.

Of course, society does not let us stay in that innocence. It teaches us borders, categories, requirements. It asks for papers, names, histories, evidence. It turns belonging into something conditional, something that must be proven again and again.

But there is still that first arrival. There is the door opening, the breath, the hands reaching out. There are the people waiting to receive what has already been loved into being.

On Juneteenth, freedom feels like a welcome long denied. It is also a welcome we must keep making possible for each other every day. Not only in law, but in practice. Freedom should be both a declaration and a way of living.

Today’s poem imagines that kind of welcome. It speaks to that miracle of arrival, to a life entering the world without needing justification. It reminds us that before the world teaches us otherwise, there is the simple and sacred fact of being received.

Poem to Watch over You
by Omotara James

The day you were born was the shortest of the year or the longest, 
there was a rain storm or hail or it was a cloudy or cloudless night 
and your mother or your birth mother or your father or your birth 
father or your life giver was reading at home, was on their way 
back from the store was on their way to work, had no place to go, 
was dreaming of you when you woke them, when it was time, 
when you were ready to arrive, to escape, to see what the fuss was 
about. On the way to the hospital, on the way home, on the way to 
the midwife, or the bathtub, in the back of the ambulance, taxi 
or parking lot, on the side of a hill, we received you, pulled you 
through, held you, made an opening and whispered, shouted, urged, 
pleaded. You are welcome, you are welcome, you are welcome. 
There were no requirements nor identification nor documentation, 
you were born without restriction. Not even the supernatural could 
hold you back, bold thing, from this oblivion.

"Poem to Watch over You" by Omotara James from SONG OF MY SOFTENING © 2024 Omotara James. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.