Author’s note: This month, massive protests were planned for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, with the aim of sounding the alarm on climate change and creating a wave of action and awareness that would take us all the way to the ballot box in November. With much of the nation now under quarantine, those planned actions have moved online to Earth Day Strikes, and we at the Daily Dose invite you to join u sin the online strike planned for April 22–24. I offer this original poem as a reminder that coming together in pursuit of climate justice is part of a long and vital tradition of changemaking in this country–and as crucial now as it ever has been.

The Passage

March on, Selma. No stopping till daybreak.

A long way we’ve come.

A long way we’ve yet to go.

We hold these truths to be. And where

and when they fail, my friends, there too shall we.

 

Together, we march in mourning.

To raise a joyful noise.

 

And we shall overcome

all borders, orders, bricks and mortars,

everything they thought would stop us

only slowed us for a time.

We march through history, a passage,

let’s remember that is

always being revised.

No stopping till dawn.

No stopping till the dit-on.

 

But everywhere we do stop,

let all the immigrants on. Let’s have a gay parade.

All sizes embodied, differently as abled, women and men

among them, trans- and inter- and a-.

 

We’re marching from Selma to D.C.,

then on to Alberta.

The First Nations will meet us there where

the land has grown so hot the birds

dare not touch the ground.

 

We’ll escalate empathy with wind

in our hair, in our lungs

we’ll sing our long song

across the generations.

 

Trust, for every one of us that falls,

three more will take her place.