Recipe for Healing

by Hannah Soyer

Art by Margaret Wiss

Needed: wind through the trees, sun on skin, the color green.

Know that, despite it feeling otherwise,

The darkness will not last forever––change is the only thing

Guaranteed. Don’t let the forces

You need to sustain your spirit be robbed

By whoever or whatever is draining your soul

And numbing your heart. The flowers never belonged to them

In the first place, the sound of the aspen leaves rustling

Is not theirs to take.

Lean on your ancestors, blood relation not necessary––

Remember those who came before you, who fought,

Who turned their hurt into anger, their anger

Into art. You will be some form of okay until

You become some form of surviving, a state

Undervalued, looked over, the same way we have been,

We are, but no longer.

Survival is resistance, living is resistance,

Self love the loudest form of revolution I know.

Margaret Wiss, Up in the Air Series, Photographs

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