Lynn Estomin's Artistic Statement:

When I read Haiku #13, the words “hope lives in their DNA” kept looping in my head. The words wouldn’t go away so I knew I had to choose #13.

13
vomiting out life they are
cargo whose hope lives
in their DNA

Initially I played around with sketches of ship cargo holds lined with bodies layered with current photographs of descendants of slaves, but I wasn’t satisfied. What really interested me about this haiku was the idea of hope and resilience. As a mother, I was taken with the idea that what we begin, what we believe in, what we fight for, is carried on by out children and their children. So in the end I threw out the sketches and started adding DNA symbols as background, hair ornaments and toys to a collage of photographs of my daughter’s Washington, DC public school students.