When They Speak of Our Time

Speech delivered at the No Kings protest at the Lexington Common, MA, October 18, 2025.

Good morning to all.

My name is Regie Gibson and I am the Inaugural Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

I always feel it necessary to say the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in my title. For me, that word: Commonwealth, has resonance – a community convened to promote the common good.

But the word commonwealth is only a word. And words don’t have meaning. Words are grunts, sounds, expectorants tions of air we shape with tone and pitch. Words have no meaning. What gives them meaning in when they are embodied and instantiated manifested and womanifested through human action.

And this is important because we are a Constitutional Republic – a community held together by a document – a document made of words. And, if those words are to have meaning it is up to us to create it.

When I think of how we got here to this place of desolation it’s easy to blame MAGA and Washington. And, for sure, they deserve their fair share of our vitriol.
But, make no mistake.

We got here one racist mother at a time.
One homophobic grandfather at a time.
One sexist brother at a time.
One transphobic sister at a time.
One slur we let pass at our dinner table at a time.
One “To hell with them – it’s about my 401k” at a time.
One turned back on another’s humanity at a time.
One hatred and disregard and shut mouth when it should have shouted:
“You will not speak death into my republic” at a time.

Every one of our sacred words we did not give action to has brought us to this.

But, when we gave the word Freedom meaning:
Men and women fought here and a country was born.

When we gave the word Freedom meaning:
Women becoming liberated happened!

When we gave the word Freedom meaning:
Desegregation of schools happened. Civil Rights happened. Gay rights and trans rights happened.
And, even though this was the first state in our union to institutionalize slavery – when we gave the word Freedom meaning – slavery went away.

Moving toward better has always been a question of who WE will decide to be.
So, who will we be? When they, in the future, speak of our time what will they say?

They will say it was a time when truth abandoned our words.
That it was when pestilence and plague were the President’s mouth.

They will say this is when the internet wedded fact to fiction,
and disinformation became main-stream and scripture.

They will say this was when we hamster-wheeled inside the jagged jaws of civic death that hovered above us licking its murderous lips.

They will say this was when civility was assassinated on the steps of our nation’s capitol – and multitudinous monstrosities masqueraded as law.

When they speak of our time they will say this was when morality gluttonously drank of hatred’s hemlock. When many mocked as democracy cowered to executive power.

They will say a horrible darkness kissed our ears – kissed until we closed our eyes and trembled with fear until we became that darkness we feared.

They will say that this was the time of God on our side – of God is our guide –
As crosses turned into gun after gun after gun behind pews of prayerful eyes –
and both red and blue forgot their God is colorblind.

They will say this was the hour of food-shrunken bellies and refugees – and of those turned away in their hour of human need even as the justly incarcerated enemies of the state walked free through prison gates.

They will say it was a time when English spoken with the “wrong” accent meant an uncertain fate.

They will say this was the time of the bullet bite, and the misogynous blight.
The applauded abuse, the anti-truth and anti-learning–
They will say that this was when we set the world on the brim of burning.

But let them also say:
That this was when we fought against a self-inflicted civic genocide.
That something transcendently human in us stood up to resist the Orwellian Jack-boot.

That finally, in the raspy baritone of Ray Charles’ voice we heard what this
country could be –

That in the wise words of Walt Whitman we rose to the challenge and charge of true democracy. That in the aspic bite of Mark Twain’s wit we finally got the punch-line – finally realized that manifest destiny would no longer patch the human-sized hole in our history.
Let them say that this is when we said yes again and again and again and again to the verses of Emma Lazarus’s New Colossus resounding with:

“Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

Let them say that this is when we said yes again and again and again and again to the verses of Pablo Neruda resounding with

Peace for the coming twilights, peace for the bridge, peace for the wine, peace for the letters that seek us and rise in our blood, peace for the city in the morning when bread rises, peace for the ashes of the fallen, peace for all the living – peace for all waters and lands.

Let them say that this was when we fought against the ways in which we have been conditioned.

Let them say this was when the woman stepped forward declaring: “I am that I am”, and we men began to break ourselves of the need to break women.
Let them say that this was when our better angels spoke and we learned to lean in and listen.

That this was the time we struggled against fist and fallacy, and that it was of judges refusing to kangaroo their courts and prove that in America the law is King.

Let them say that this was when our youth saw us gathered here – found truth and hope fluttering madly on their tongues like a caged feathered thing – and because of us they were unafraid to open their mouths and let it stretch its wings and sing!

Let them say that we were a people of a humanistic faith in a time when faith in humanity was foolish.

That we were a people of infinite hope when it made no sense to hope at all.

That we still believed love could be as simple as the images our ancestors painted on caves––images birthed from our first human songs—songs of: water and flower, the sun, moon and star, and wind and rain and river and fire––– and that even as all shook beneath our shoes you knew that you were part of me
and I was part of you and you and you and that we are all part of ALL!

Oh…let them say this was a time we desperately reached through the malignant maelstrom of electronic chaos.

Reached through the mad and maddening invocations of the soulless who profit from the poisonous pathology of our time –

Reached through and found others with our own eyes – with our own hands – reaching back.

Literary performer Regie Gibson has lectured and performed widely in the U.S., Cuba & Europe. Representing the U.S. in Italy, Regie competed for and received both the Absolute Poetry Award in Monfalcone and The Europa in Versi Award in LaGuardia di Como. He’s a Brother Thomas Fellow and has received two Live Arts Boston Grants to develop his first play, The Juke: A Blues Bacchae in which he intersects the ancient Greek tragedy with African American spiritual & musical culture. Regie has served as consultant for the NEA’s “How Art Works” commission and the “Mere Distinction of Color”: a permanent exhibit at James Madison’s Montpelier home focusing on American slavery and the U.S. constitution. He has composed texts for The Boston City Singers, The Mystic Chorale, the Handel+Haydn Society, and has featured with the Lexington Symphony. He’s an actor and creator of The Shakespeare Time-Traveling Speakeasy — a theatrical, literary-concert focusing on the life & works of William Shakespeare and is the Artistic Director of Arts for Social Cohesion — a social transformation organization using arts and pedagogy to strengthen relationships within and between communities. He serves on the boards of the New England Poetry Club & Grub Street Writers and teaches at Berklee College of Music and Clark University. On May 30th, 2025 he was appointed by Governor Maura Healy to be the Inaugural Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.