I am happily married and we have two sons whom I love dearly and who are wonderful, funny, creative, loving boys who make me proud. I like to live near the sea.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so
that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It's not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated
from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
by Marianne Williamson
For more information about poet and spiritual teacher, Marianne Williamson, see:
Pity the drunks in this late April snow.
They drank their hats and coats a week ago.
They touch the sun, they tapped the melting ground,
In public parks we saw them sitting round
The merry campfire of a cider jar
Upon a crocus cloth Alas some are
Already stiff in mortuaries who were
Seduced by Spring to go from here to there,
Putting their best foot forward on the road
To Walkden, Camberwell or Leeds. It snowed.
It met them waiting at the roundabout.
They had no hats or coats to keep it out.
They did a lap or two, they caught a cough
They did another lap and shuffled off.
by David Constantine
For more information about the poet, David Constantine, see:
in the backseat of my car are my own sons,
still not yet Tamir’s age, already having heard
me warn them against playing with toy pistols,
though my rhetoric is always about what I don’t
like, not what I fear, because sometimes
I think of Tamir Rice & shed tears, the weeping
all another insignificance, all another way to avoid
saying what should be said: the Second Amendment
is a ruthless one, the pomp & constitutional circumstance
that says my arms should be heavy with the weight
of a pistol when forced to confront death like
this: a child, a hidden toy gun, an officer that fires
before his heart beats twice. My two young sons play
in the backseat while the video of Tamir dying
plays in my head, & for everything I do know, the thing
I don’t say is that this should not be the brick and mortar
of poetry, the moment when a black father drives
his black sons to school & the thing in the air is the death
of a black boy that the father cannot mention,
because to mention the death is to invite discussion
of taboo: if you touch my sons the crimson
that touches the concrete must belong, at some point,
to you, the police officer who justifies the echo
of the fired pistol; taboo: the thing that says that justice
is a killer’s body mangled and disrupted by bullets
because his mind would not accept the narrative
of your child’s dignity, of his right to life, of his humanity,
and the crystalline brilliance you saw when your boys first breathed;
the narrative must invite more than the children bleeding
on crisp fall days; & this is why I hate it all, the people around me,
the black people who march, the white people who cheer,
the other brown people, Latinos & Asians & all the colors of humanity
that we erase in this American dance around death, as we
are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn
to see a man die; there is so much that has to disappear
for my mind not to abandon sanity: Tamir for instance, everything
about him, even as his face, really and truly reminds me
of my own, in the last photo I took before heading off
to a cell, disappears, and all I have stomach for is blood,
and there is a part of me that wishes that it would go away,
the memories, & that I could abandon all talk of making it right
& justice. But my mind is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound
to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father,
mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everything
they see into a grave & make home the series of cells
that so many of my brothers already call their tomb.
byR. Dwayne Betts
For more information about poet, R. Dwayne Betts, see:
Now
when I was a young man, I carried me pack, and I lived the free life of a rover
From the Murray's green basin to the dusty outback, well, I waltzed my Matilda
all over.
Then in 1915, my country said son, It's time you stopped rambling, there's work
to be done.
So they gave me a tin hat, and they gave me a gun, and they marched me away to
the war.
And
the band played Waltzing Matilda, as the ship pulled away from the quay
And amidst all the cheers, the flag-waving and tears, we sailed off for
Gallipoli
And how well I remember that terrible day, how our blood stained the sand and
the water
And of how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay, we were butchered like
lambs at the slaughter.
Johnny Turk he was waiting, he'd primed himself well. He shower'd us with
bullets,
And he rained us with shell. And in five minutes flat, he'd blown us all to
hell
Nearly blew us right back to Australia.
But the band played Waltzing Matilda, when we stopped to bury our slain.
We buried ours, and the Turks buried theirs, then we started all over again.
And those that were left, well we tried to survive, in that mad world of blood, death and fire
And for ten weary weeks, I kept myself alive, though around me the corpses piled higher
Then a big Turkish shell knocked me arse over head, and when I woke up in my hospital bed,
And saw what it had done, well I wished I was dead. Never knew there was worse things than dyin'.
For I'll go no more waltzing Matilda, all around the green bush
far and free
To hump tent and pegs, a man needs both legs-no more waltzing Matilda for me.
So they gathered the crippled, the wounded, the maimed, and they shipped us
back home to Australia.
The armless, the legless, the blind, the insane, those proud wounded heroes of
Suvla
And as our ship sailed into Circular Quay, I looked at the place where me legs
used to be.
And thanked Christ there was nobody waiting for me, to grieve, to mourn, and to
pity.
But the band played Waltzing Matilda, as they carried us down the
gangway.
But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared, then they turned all their
faces away.
And so now every April, I sit on me porch, and I watch the parade pass before
me.
And I see my old comrades, how proudly they march, reviving old dreams of past
glories
The old men march slowly, old bones stiff and sore, the tired old heroes from a
forgotten war
And the young people ask, what are they marching for? And I ask myself the same
question.
But the band plays Waltzing Matilda, and the old men still answer the call, But as year follows year, more old men disappear. Someday no one will march there at all. Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda, who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me? And their ghosts may be heard as they march by that billabong, who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
by Seamus Heaney
For more information about poet, Seamus Heaney, see:
