On the night of Dec. 21, under the archway of the historic Santa Barbara County Courthouse, we gathered for the 13th annual Longest Night candlelight vigil to remember those who died while homeless this past year.

The air was mercifully mild. The crowd — about 75 people — was smaller than in some years, but no less attentive, no less reverent.

More than 70 names were read aloud. We know the real number is higher.

This year’s vigil was organized with care and determination by the Lived Experience Working Group of SB ACT, led by Landon Ranck and Letty Trujillo. They carried the weight of the night with dignity.

Clergy from Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist traditions stood together, reminding us that grief and moral responsibility do not belong to one faith — or one politics.

When I stepped forward to read my poem, “I Saw the Best Souls of My City,” I wasn’t trying to perform. I was trying to testify.

“I saw the best souls of my city,” the poem begins, “standing in line at dawn with pockets full of loose change.”

I saw them arguing softly over coffee, whispering prayers under fluorescent lights, anointing cracked hands with baby oil, passing a blunt like a peace pipe on a public bench after midnight.

This is not metaphor. This is Santa Barbara.

For nearly two decades, I’ve done street outreach here. I’ve sat on curbs and in alleyways, under freeway ramps and behind shopping centers.

I’ve listened to men and women explain their moral worlds — how they look out for one another, which corners are safe, which shelters will turn you away for coughing wrong, and which outreach workers will actually come back.

The poem speaks of tents becoming sanctuaries, shopping carts becoming arks, and people staying half-awake so they can watch the others breathe.

It names what many prefer not to see: that entire communities, entire ethical systems, exist beneath our line of sight.

It also names the violence that brought them there.

“They were evicted by rents that doubled while wages stayed flat,” I read. “Denied detox beds because the waitlist was months long. Left to self-medicate psychic agony with fentanyl because treatment required appointments they could not keep — without phones, addresses, or hope.”

One of the names we read Sunday night was Timothy John Largent, age 31, from Bakersfield. He just wanted one night when his skull wasn’t screaming.

There were no detox beds. Paying clients came first. Fentanyl was easier to find than mercy.

Many people came up to me afterward, some with tears in their eyes, thanking me for the poem. But the poem isn’t the point. The lives are.

The poem’s second movement turns its gaze toward us — toward the systems and decisions that made these deaths predictable.

It asks who calls themselves compassionate while voting to criminalize camping, who shrugs and calls rent explosions “market forces,” who opens warming centers only when the temperature drops low enough to justify indifference.

And it does not let me off the hook either.

“I handed out socks and hope,” the poem says, “while the city debated whether harm reduction sent the wrong message.”

That line hurts because it’s true.

Outreach workers do holy work — but charity without housing is charity theater. Harm reduction without treatment beds is cruelty with good intentions. Compassion without structural change is a lullaby that helps a city sleep through its own failure.

The most important section of the poem is the one that begins, simply, with “We.”

“We who were called unlovable held one another like scripture under bridges,” I read. “Shared hunger like lullabies. Passed joints like communion.”

I wanted people to understand this: those we lose are not isolated individuals. They are members of communities that love, mourn, protect and remember one another — often better than we do.

We also heard hopeful news. Santa Barbara County’s Homeless Death Review Team, facilitated by county Public Health, is finally restarting after being dormant for three or four years.

That matters. Counting the dead is not enough, but refusing to count them is worse. Accountability begins with naming.

When the last candle was lit and the last name spoken, the vigil ended the way it always does: quietly. The officials did not attend. The crowd dispersed. The city went back to itself.

But the poem refuses closure.

“They are not lost,” I read. “They were abandoned.”

And that is the truth Santa Barbara must face.

We must house all our homeless neighbors. Not manage them. Not shuffle them. Not mourn them once a year. House them.

Until we do, I will keep reading the names. We will keep gathering on the longest night. And I will keep saying what the city would rather not hear:

These were the best souls of our city. And their deaths were not inevitable.

Click here for the complete poem, “I Saw the Best Souls of My City.”