Libre

Oh my beloved world

You have given me so much and yet so little

Always offering an answer to my questions

Always with a comeback for where I come from

And yet here I stand

Still full of questions of self

For your responses my world,

Have been an unread subscription

That lingers on the coffee table

With images that grab.

But your answers do not fill

So I just wanna say, "Yo soy libre"

Because I have been freed by the great I Am.

For I am as the cobblestone on

The Grand Concourse that call out

From breaks in the asphalt

What was once suffocating

From sinful tar and stony heart

Has been freed from the heat of Grace

I now see through the melting-pot holes

And now by my presence I call out

To the world that this land on the

Surface is not all there is or was

Yo soy libre porque El me ha liberado

¡Libre!

I am Carravagio spray painted

On the Spanish-Harlem wall

The beauty is unquestionable

And it calls out to all

But some choose to dismiss it

As Medieval graffiti

Chaining themselves up

With the fetters of false ideologies

Worshipping the beauty of creation

While executing in their hearts the Creator

Who has freed me

Yo soy libre porque El me ha liberado

¡Libre!

I am one who stands in awe of the martyrs,

But my tastes have changed

For once my heroes were

Pancho Villa, Che and Trotsky

For these died for what they believed

But man cannot find his end in himself

I too have envied the rich

Wishing it were I instead of they

For these lived for what they achieved or received

But man cannot be his own measure

So I have traded in the rhetoric of empowerment

For the contradiction of the Cross.

And now I know what freedom is

Yo soy libre porque El me ha liberado

¡Libre!

For what the Lord has kept from the wise and learned

He had revealed to mere children

That one must lose his life in order to gain it

Now my heroes are

A wrinkled blue and white

Flower from Calcutta

A bishop of a war torn land

Killed for preaching peace

And a man who goes throughout the world

Clothed in white

Saying, "Do not be afraid"

Lord, help me not to be afraid…

Lord, I need you to help me to not to be afraid…

Porque Yo soy libre,

Tu me has liberado.

Libre.