AndWhatifWeAreNew?, Amaya Wooding

Footnote longer than the poem: Have you noticed how we rush to the past to justify our present? Have you seen how such a method can come at the cost of ignoring or devaluing the amazing and novel ways we have available to us within our moment? What is the present but the future of the past? What is magic but technology beyond comprehension? This poem is about facing the youth of our methods and saying, yes, we may be old, but also we are new, and what of it? Newness is a result of creativity, of adaptation, of the dynamics of survival. “God is change, ” Octavia Butler says through Lauren Olamina. And we are not fossils. Newness is a sign of life. Let us ascend.

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