Everyone and Everyone

Poetry & Prose by Britt Wolfe

Build for us a world that takes no names away—
a world wide as an ocean and soft as a palm,
where doorways are wide enough for every shape of sorrow,
where thresholds know how to hold delight without judgement.

Let the streets be braided with laughter and truth,
pavements that remember how small feet ran reckless,
parks that keep the scars of games as crowns,
and rooftops that collect the sun like common coin.
Let no one be priced out of morning.
Let no child be taught to measure wonder by fear.

Imagine architecture that understands bodies:
roomy corridors for those who move slow,
bright windows for souls who need light,
benches deep enough to cradle heavy years—
homes that do not demand you edit yourself to fit.
Imagine language that refuses to exile anyone,
grammar that holds plural verbs for plural lives.

Everyone and everyone—let that be our prayer and our plan:
the elder and the child, the stranger and the neighbour,
the ones who love loudly and the ones who love in whispers,
the bodies that shimmer different from your textbook,
the minds that bend in ways you cannot map.
Every hurt and every miracle welcomed here.

We will teach our children the geography of empathy:
how to map another’s hunger without stealing their history,
how to sit with anger until it cools into accountability,
how to forgive without forgetting the lesson of damage.
Let justice be a river that irrigates every garden,
not a gate that closes on those who differ.

This world will not be quiet in the face of cruelty.
It will name harm and uproot it like rot,
but it will hold the harmed with more tenderness than judgement.
Radical acceptance is not an abdication—
it is the most demanding, luminous work of keeping one another whole.

Let us build marketplaces of belonging:
where labour is honoured, rest is sacred, and joy is a public good.
Let art be a language everyone can borrow to say their truth;
let music be the soil in which difference grows not only tolerated but admired.

Everyone and everyone—repeat it until it becomes the city’s anthem,
until the syllables are carved into crosswalks, hummed in elevators,
stitched into the cuffs of school uniforms and the hems of coats.
Let it be what wakes us and what lets us sleep:
a promise that no life will be trimmed to suit another’s comfort.

If fear knocks, we open our hands and show it the horizon.
If hate builds walls, we plant trees whose roots will crack the mortar.
If someone says absence is the only safe answer, we reply with presence—constant, tireless, fierce.

For love is not a passive room to be occupied;
it is a labour, a craft, a revolution that begins at the ordinary table.
We will practise small mercies until they are mighty—
the daily salvations that, stacked, make a life generous and ungovernable.

Everyone and everyone—this is our covenant:
to refuse the grammar of exclusion, to refuse the habit of turning away,
to hold the world open with outrage and with tenderness,
with the stubbornness of people who have tasted liberty and will not barter it.

Build it for us. Build it with us.
We will arrive in a hundred colours, in every manner of song,
and we will stay until the world is wide enough to hold us all.

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