Thursday, March 02, 2006

Not Staying On Top of Things

Today is Texas Independence Day, which I usually celebrate by not celebrating at all. It's usually something along the lines of, "Oh, today is March 2. Texas Independence Day."

Anyway, I wanted to write about Black History Month, not Texas Independence Day, so bear with me. My daughter read the following poem from Robert Hayden poem "Frederick Douglass" at her school assembly. She's a very articulate, confident reader for an 8-year-old, which is why they asked a blonde-haired white girl to read a poem for Black History Month. And this poem is amazing:

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

For a thoughtful examination of this poem, read the Say Something Wonderful Blog.

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