“Freedom Dreams from the Valley”
(a poem on oppression and the dream of liberation)
The foot that pressed on George Floyd's neck
was not just one man’s weight—
it was the crush of empires,
the same steel boot
pressing down on Gaza’s breathless night.
Oppression wears many flags,
but the blood speaks a single tongue.
We remember him.
Not just George, but every name
buried beneath the concrete of Cop City,
85 acres of mock warzones,
training for the next suppression,
built on sacred earth where
ancestors whisper in trees,
and resistance grows in the roots.
They tell us we’re dreaming—
that to demand a loaf when we’ve been given crumbs
is naive.
But we say:
Everything would be all right
if everything was put back in the hands of the people.
And we will put it there,
dirty hands, tired hands,
grasping toward something we’ve never fully known
but always remembered:
freedom.
We dream from the valley,
where our people live and labor,
where the children drink poison from rusted pipes,
where no one hits the lotto
but billionaires fly in private jets
over streets lined with tents.
Still, we dream.
We say:
Nobody goes!
They come for one, they come for all—
but we stay with the people.
Because socialism is the people,
and if you’re afraid of that,
you’re afraid of yourself,
afraid to look in the mirror
and see that the house you’ve built
was made from stolen bricks.
We’ve seen the mountaintop.
We’ve heard its empty wind.
But our home is in the valley—
among the hands that cook, and plant,
and hold the line against riot shields.
Our enemy is on the mountaintop.
Our friends are in the valley.
Let the house of greed burn.
Let the silence break.
No more sweet-talking the architect of our chains—
tell him what kind of hell we’ve been catching.
Tell him this Earth cannot breathe
with barbed wire in her lungs,
with policies that poison her rivers,
that breaks her back for profit.
We want a world not of profits,
but of people.
Not of domination,
but liberation.
Not of Cop Cities,
but green sanctuaries
where ancestors return as trees
and children are not targets.
Let this be our freedom dream:
That the system will go,
and we—
rooted in the valley,
eyes to the horizon—
will rise with the people,
and build a world where no one
has to beg to live.
"Imperialism has to go.
It is a poison killing people all over the world."
And we—
We are the antidote.
-by Ezran Castillo