Freedom is not the absence of walls,
it is the room built wide enough for a child to run in,
and safe enough that she never has to.
What is a right, if not a promise
made before we knew the one it was made to?
What is a duty, if not that promise kept?
A book is a door that stays open after the reader leaves.
A poem is a hand extended across a century.
Somewhere a girl reads by a window
and the window becomes a country
larger than the one that made her.
We call it hunger when the body is not fed.
Call it, too, the mind unread, the hand untaught,
the field unshared while granaries hoard the harvest.
Even the earth asks for a kind of freedom:
not to be used up, but used well,
the way a well is drawn from, not drained.
A better world unlearns the hoarding,
teaches the fence to feed the field it once divided,
teaches the table to grow longer, not the wall.
So let the classroom be a clearing in the forest,
let the crayon be as trusted as the treaty,
let every child inherit a world
still whole enough to open.
