This poem was first published on 24 November 2014. We are re-presenting it this week as part of our resistance special.

You Are Here

You need to take the Blue Line to Memorial Park – move up around the
axis to the second exit. (You can use your home vehicle.) You walk along
the fence and turn right to find the entrance ahead. The fountain is
inside, centered in the hall; to locate it, you need to walk past the core
steles along the main avenue.

At the time of liberation and crisis, this was the largest cavern inside
the planetoid, dug for the purpose of mining ore; but the mine became
repurposed as a war memorial when independence was declared. The lights
overhead fade out in response to your awareness and darken to a constant
gray, reminding the visitor of generations past in the face of what is yet
to be. With each moment, the baseline of your memories shifts, creating an
unsettling dream atmosphere. The quiet, oblique space opens wide and
resounds with your own breathing. You can touch the fragments and pebbles
embedded in the stone mantle, but beware of your instinctive missteps –
the ground is uneven. You can assert yourself and call from the inside,
expecting deliverance, but any wrongs are products of your own mind and
your preconceptions. You are the mirror.

[ PROCEED ]

Was: Blue Line to Memorial Park

The cavern inside you resounds with the purpose of generations past;
you walk ahead, expecting the lights overhead to darken any second
and the dream to fade out to the constant gray of baseline awareness.
Turn to move, mine your memories for ore and liberation. You are here
and with each moment you assert your independence, centered inside
the planetoid you can call your own. You need to find the fence around
the fountain, to walk along the main avenue and touch the steles; exit
as the entrance opens wide – this is your need to locate your home when
you are but a visitor, creating a memorial from repurposed fragments,
the unsettling space inside became embedded in your core,
reminding you of past missteps. Take up the mantle but beware the war,
the instinctive response to right declared wrongs at the time of crisis –
the quiet in the hall is the vehicle of your own uneven breathing
and the ground shifts along an oblique axis. It is the deliverance
of the mind – preconceptions dug in stone and atmosphere;
the largest products mining can use are but pebbles in the face of
what was – and can yet be. Mirror yourself.