You’re Free (How Deep Is Your Love?)

A Ritual in Song Titles by Ultra Naté

May 22, 2025

Song Title Poetry Challenge Letter U

This poem is composed entirely of song titles by Ultra Naté, arranged in a repeating pattern inspired by the villanelle—a poetic form built on echo, return, and insistence. Like the music itself, the form becomes a ritual: what repeats does not weaken—it deepens.

Free wasn’t just a song for me—it was the song of my summer in 1997. That July, I stood on the edge of starting a new life in the U.S., studying at U.C. Berkeley, feeling closer to becoming myself than I had ever dared to imagine. I didn’t stay. No opportunity arose, and I didn’t have the grounding, then, to risk staying illegally. I also didn’t yet understand the full shape of the trauma I was carrying.

Still, that summer was the closest I had come in my first 57 years to being free from the life I’d been handed. That longing, that almost—I can still hear it. And this poem answers it, beat by beat.