What is strength?

What is strength?
To look inside the self
where there is a gap
between happiness
and what I'm leading my life for.

Contradictions
displacement
like lands being slipped from underneath
due to programming
seeking something
more than I have

and I've scratched this now
Dug up this present
in order to build a ladder
out of what I know
to be in that bright white
called success
out of this ghetto.

But little do I know
I've dug up the bones of my ancestors
and their fragments litter homelands
so that their spirits haunt our bodies
stealing our spirits
so we are empty and epileptic
Because we have left them
empty and desecrated
They died the same deaths
we do now
But at faster rates
And they do this haunting
because they guard us from the graves
Wanting us to wake up
from the dream
of disconnection

Piko, pusod, puseg, the gut
Umbilical that connected us
As we traversed the place
we now call Pacific
We sailed from island to island
trusting our intuition
that by reading the currents
the language of birds
the talk of the water
the eyes of the stars and the sun
we would find our way
trust that each lifetime
is just a step toward something
And our ability to remember
is what lives on
in collective memories that generate
layers on a spinning wheel
thrown out as seeds
from the center.
We floated, landed and dug deep our roots
in different worlds
connecting them
with invisible connections
piko, pusod, puseg, this gut

What is strength?
But to remember that which has been severed.
To study the wounds of the cut
and understand the ridges of the knife
the tear of the flesh
to understand their weapons
so we may come back with our own healing
to ensure that weapon no longer exists.
To teach future generations
medicine of our own knowledge
that sense
to be reconnected
to our insides, because it is our compass
To determine the journey
into what is made black
what is made bleeding
what is made fearful

That is the strength
to feel the burning in one's heart
that it ignites the eyes to tears
To express that something has gone imbalanced
And that you have a medicine for it.

That is strength.