A House That Cannot Fall by Scott Woods
A hundred years from now, people who look vaguely like we used to
will wonder, How did they ever make it?
And someone who still smells of books and everything
ever used as a bookmark will point to this place and say,
“We built this house that cannot fall.”
This house of dreams and stories and all of the worlds;
where there is always one more thing to become.
One day we may even hold your name in it, wrapped
in our spines and fallen leaves pressed into history,
Maybe make a movement of your Mondays,
a revolution of the dreams you could no longer carry,
bookish types carrying lanterns through the coalmines of ignorance.
Like anything else, you get what you put in
and now that it is here, we put the royal you into it,
the sterling dream, the hope of the marching past,
filled with the silence of riots and all of the bookmarks left behind in pages –
the flattened dandelion, ancient grocery lists,
the birthday card you do not want your auntie to know
you did not keep. We hold your secrets, but
the biggest secret is that you can never be alone
in a house like this, where your ancestors still walk the halls,
grandmothers still marching the striking shores of Selma,
where we keep change on tap.
There are things you cannot claim to be if you do not keep this house:
a democracy, the future, a keeper of faiths.
Who told you that you could be a civilization without a house like this?
That you could be great without its lessons?
Who told you there was nowhere to turn
when your dreams run low and your mountains high?
Some things we cannot let become history,
cannot afford to sit on the shelves of the museum,
revered and forbidden to the moment,
untouched by the hungry fingers of change.
We must carry some freedoms, grip them tight in our hands.
We have so many things left to build
on top of all the things we have built.
There are places in this world where houses like this
sit quiet for all the wrong reasons, bear no honorable names,
their walls crumbling over quaking bedrocks of fear,
the pages of all their books blank and singed anyway,
where the architects of houses go missing over their words
and injustice is a wine and this poem has no metaphors.
For those evicted from their homes
we build bigger living rooms, widen the doors to bursting,
add entire wings, and then, pointing to this place,
we say, “We built this house that cannot fall,
and in it, you may be free at last.”
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