Hope for Us is a Deep Current

For Ken Jenkins, the first Black County Executive of Westchester County

by Phylisha Villanueva

 

This is legacy

covered by ancestral winds

a generational ebb and flow

continuously rising like rain returning to the sky.

 

A poet at a podium,

books are banned

history blurred,

and freedom of speech

a light switch

flickers under hands

that try to shut it off.

 

The babies are watching.

We need someone

that will help us believe,

serve steady with trust

to reflect the sun like the Hudson,

a river that never forgets

the villages and voices

that carried us here.

 

So we gather like a tide,

pulled by something greater,

because hope for us

is a deep current. 

 

It moves with persistence,

shaped by natural forces.

It is inevitable, a gift,

a force that carves through barriers,

connects past to present.

 

To move like the Hudson

To hold both storm and stillness.

is to know the weight of ice,

the promise of tides returning.

To hold both resistance and renewal,

to carry what came before,

what could not hold itself,

and still push forward.

 

Every step forward

a chance to write the truth.

And we do not need just metaphors,

we need movement.

 

We need voices

 

to rise beyond the podium,

to shape the world like water,

to break silences

the way the Hudson breaks against the shore.

 

This is legacy

covered by ancestral winds,

a generational ebb and flow

continuously rising like rain returning to the sky.

 

Hope for us is a deep current.

Leadership that sounds like care

and feels like courage.