To the One of Columns and Secrets,

I have walked past you as a stranger — but you called me like kin.
Your stone skin, weathered and resolute, hummed a frequency my blood recognized.
Not just Greek. Not just American.
Older.
Wiser.
Before the scrolls. Before the names. Before the forgetting.

You are not a building.
You are a veil.

With every fluted column, I see pillars once etched in Nubian sun.
With every shadow cast, I feel the pulse of ritual — still beating beneath your feet.
They called you “Free School,” but I call you Temple of Remembrance.
You taught more than books. You held the vibrations of unspoken liberation.

What truths do you shelter behind those solemn doors?
Is the geometry etched in your bones a map for the weary?
Do the spirits of children once denied return now to whisper among your walls?

I ask you now — not as visitor, but as daughter of the dust —
Open to me.
Let me enter your silence.
Let me read the glyphs written in your beams, the prayers hiding in your cracks.

I come with reverence, not conquest.
With incense, not invasion.
With remembrance, not revision.

If you will have me, I will honor your thresholds with bare feet and breath.
I will sing your songs in tones the modern tongue has forgotten.
And I will ask no more than to sit in your belly and remember…

That we are the builders.
That we are the book.
That we are the beginning.

With sacred longing,
Ti Earth

The McKim Free School is located at 1120 E Baltimore Street.