Tori Collins has lived in the Navy Yard neighborhood since 2014.
She came to DC to work as a transportation analyst during the Obama istration.
Tori started writing poems at a young age and won her first poetry contest as an eighth-grade student. She is published in the literary magazine Burgeon (now The Mid-Atlantic Review) and For Women Who Roar. Her writing is influenced by the power of words and she considers herself a community-inspired poet. Her words are not always based primarily on her feelings but on those communities she wants to give a voice.
THE BELOVED COMMUNITY
A community in action is akin to the Lion on the Mountaintop whose rustic dream roars in reality; dreams so lucid they spread to the masses in clouds of equality, freedom, equity, and reparations.
A community in action moves as one with hope in abundance and with audacity as we heal after our bodies, minds, spirits are triaged and removed to the cross we each bear.
Each of us sharing our mountaintop, a place where laws are written on scrolls; 27 amendments containing 10 bills of rights including a fraudulent bill of sale proving that freedom never comes easy.
A community in action doesn’t mean Easter comes before Good Friday or empowerment before invalidation.
What the Dreamer sought was not unreasonable; the opportunity to be impossibly free in an environment that s, respects, hears, and listens to those united by the divine call.
The Dreamer saw the vision of a community in action, the beloved community; a people empowered to acknowledge that we are of one family and every member of the family can be at home on earth.
A community in action is a safe and sacred refuge.
We are a community in action empowered by an ever evolving dream.
Sandra Beasley is the curator of “Poetic Hill,” a resident of Southwest, and the author of four poetry collections. If you live in D.C. and you’re interested in being featured, you can reach her at [email protected] for questions and submissions (1-5 poems).
