The Foundation
of the Earth

Samuel Shenova

I did not discover death outside the palace walls. I am a normal man in the street, suffering does not surprise me. My exit is from inheritance, from worlds and ways I never asked for. It is not by choice that I fear or that I love, but I hold my ancestors with tenderness. I live as though they pray for my freedom because my freedom is their freedom. That is why I see and seek. That is why I rebuild the world from the dirt, replace the foundation of the Earth, holding the entirety of pain with some hunch of another way. What I fear to lose may be worth losing. It may already be gone, the palace. So I would teach survival that there is no security ahead. By death or another day, there is endless freedom.