This weather (Heavenly Father)
speaks peace to my heart.
Tuesday, January 31
Tuesday, January 24
the question i never knew mama was teaching me to ask
Who do you love more:
that dress,
or your own self?
that dress,
or your own self?
You = the fact that I think about you
You make me want to write poems.
Or pull my hair out.
Can't quite decide.
Or pull my hair out.
Can't quite decide.
Monday, January 23
The Comfort of Walking Alone
It's not fair to say I miss you.
I don't even know you yet.
Better, perhaps, to say
I wish, one day, to miss
All that you could be.
I don't even know you yet.
Better, perhaps, to say
I wish, one day, to miss
All that you could be.
Sunday, January 22
(too quick to the trigger)
the hand that waves
and the eyes that smile
are two parts of me
that don't know how
to let each other
say the same thing
and the eyes that smile
are two parts of me
that don't know how
to let each other
say the same thing
Tuesday, January 17
Dreams Not Meant for Sleeping
I will never forget what my hometown taught me: though classes might be cancelled and mail not delivered, today, Martin Luther King Day, is a "day on" not a day off.
The March on Washington is taught as if it's recent history, which makes it seem crazy (at least to me) to think that the famous "I Have a Dream Speech" was given a full 49 years ago. But in another way, it's crazy to think that it was given only 49 years ago. So much has changed since.
"...little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and girls as sisters and brothers."
Of all the beautiful rhetoric and passionately delivered words in the speech, this has always been the image that most stuck out to me. I imagine Dr. King penning the words in his heart, all the while seeing in his mind's eye the so-yearned for image of his sons and daughters playing tag in a backyard with children of Caucasian friends. I see him jot those words down with tears in his eyes, and then I see him deliver them, holding onto the picture of his children and infusing all his claim to it into the words issuing from his mouth.
Sometimes I think of those words when I walk among the children at the community center here in Muncie. There are white boys and black girls, and black boys and white girls, all "sitting down together at the table of brotherhood" for as simple a thing as a snack of graham crackers and grapes. Here: a scene that would have been priceless 50 years ago, viewed weekly by volunteers who don't hardly know not to take it for granted.
Of course, not everything is fixed. The community center is in a bad part of town, and the population there appears to be predominately black. While there is no racism or anything like it among the children, sometimes I catch them subconsciously segregating themselves. I wonder about these signs, and take them as a reminder of how different things once were and how far we've come.
I also take them as a reminder to keep coming. Because being different is good and a matter of course - but being afraid of different, or threatened by different, or made prideful by differences - those are the things that are wholly unacceptable. If ever our society is challenged to accept differences again - and it is, every day - the challenges will not come looking like those Martin Luther King battled and taught us to overcome.
Which is why I think, if Dr. King could tell us something today, it would be to keep dreaming. We have had success - he'd point it out there on the playground down the street. But if we know Dr. King, if we yearn to share the energy and ideology so immortalized into this great historical figure, we won't be afraid to turn our heads to the other corner, where a homeless veteran is traumatized by PTSD, a child is kidnapped to pose for pornography, or a gay student is bullied to death.
The problems are always going to be there. We don't need, and probably won't often have, someone to stand at podium and proclaim to the nation that the problems are real and wrong. Rare will be the moments of clarity and purpose where we can stand united together and say "we will overcome."
Yet, already, we have done some overcoming. What are we for, if not to do more?
The March on Washington is taught as if it's recent history, which makes it seem crazy (at least to me) to think that the famous "I Have a Dream Speech" was given a full 49 years ago. But in another way, it's crazy to think that it was given only 49 years ago. So much has changed since.
"...little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and girls as sisters and brothers."
Of all the beautiful rhetoric and passionately delivered words in the speech, this has always been the image that most stuck out to me. I imagine Dr. King penning the words in his heart, all the while seeing in his mind's eye the so-yearned for image of his sons and daughters playing tag in a backyard with children of Caucasian friends. I see him jot those words down with tears in his eyes, and then I see him deliver them, holding onto the picture of his children and infusing all his claim to it into the words issuing from his mouth.
Sometimes I think of those words when I walk among the children at the community center here in Muncie. There are white boys and black girls, and black boys and white girls, all "sitting down together at the table of brotherhood" for as simple a thing as a snack of graham crackers and grapes. Here: a scene that would have been priceless 50 years ago, viewed weekly by volunteers who don't hardly know not to take it for granted.
Of course, not everything is fixed. The community center is in a bad part of town, and the population there appears to be predominately black. While there is no racism or anything like it among the children, sometimes I catch them subconsciously segregating themselves. I wonder about these signs, and take them as a reminder of how different things once were and how far we've come.
I also take them as a reminder to keep coming. Because being different is good and a matter of course - but being afraid of different, or threatened by different, or made prideful by differences - those are the things that are wholly unacceptable. If ever our society is challenged to accept differences again - and it is, every day - the challenges will not come looking like those Martin Luther King battled and taught us to overcome.
Which is why I think, if Dr. King could tell us something today, it would be to keep dreaming. We have had success - he'd point it out there on the playground down the street. But if we know Dr. King, if we yearn to share the energy and ideology so immortalized into this great historical figure, we won't be afraid to turn our heads to the other corner, where a homeless veteran is traumatized by PTSD, a child is kidnapped to pose for pornography, or a gay student is bullied to death.
The problems are always going to be there. We don't need, and probably won't often have, someone to stand at podium and proclaim to the nation that the problems are real and wrong. Rare will be the moments of clarity and purpose where we can stand united together and say "we will overcome."
Yet, already, we have done some overcoming. What are we for, if not to do more?
Friday, January 13
Pretentious But True :)
To the kid in my journalism class - this is why we can't be friends.
Today I rode my bike across campus in dress shoes and pants in the snow to interview a provost. I made arrangements to be late to a class so I could curse the cold and try to get a man with too many titles to forget about his incessantly ringing cell phone and say something that didn't sound scripted. You slept in and checked Facebook.
It's not that we couldn't be friends; I think you're swell. But we can't be friends - it wouldn't work - not when this huge part of my life is something that in all truth you're just passively studying. You'd get annoyed about my having to transcribe all the time, and I couldn't fathom how you can act like that textbook is god. It wouldn't be fair for either of us.
If you want to be friends, I suggest you join a publication. Soon enough you'd know why it's insulting when said provost dismisses the journalist who just got done interviewing him with the admoniton: "don't forget to do your homework." Then you could properly rejoice with me over a well-written headline, and feel triumphant after spending too much time thinking of just the right words for a story that's only going to get read and thrown away tomorrow.
Please join a publication. Or two. If you stayed, we might finally have something substantial to base a friendship on. Until then, we'd best leave each other more or less alone. I've got stories to write.
Today I rode my bike across campus in dress shoes and pants in the snow to interview a provost. I made arrangements to be late to a class so I could curse the cold and try to get a man with too many titles to forget about his incessantly ringing cell phone and say something that didn't sound scripted. You slept in and checked Facebook.
It's not that we couldn't be friends; I think you're swell. But we can't be friends - it wouldn't work - not when this huge part of my life is something that in all truth you're just passively studying. You'd get annoyed about my having to transcribe all the time, and I couldn't fathom how you can act like that textbook is god. It wouldn't be fair for either of us.
If you want to be friends, I suggest you join a publication. Soon enough you'd know why it's insulting when said provost dismisses the journalist who just got done interviewing him with the admoniton: "don't forget to do your homework." Then you could properly rejoice with me over a well-written headline, and feel triumphant after spending too much time thinking of just the right words for a story that's only going to get read and thrown away tomorrow.
Please join a publication. Or two. If you stayed, we might finally have something substantial to base a friendship on. Until then, we'd best leave each other more or less alone. I've got stories to write.
Closer Than It Appears
The lady in the Taco Bell drive thru line in front of us was wearing too many pounds and a permanent frown on her face. She was driving a beat up gray pickup truck, a Dodge, with rust and red stripes on the tailgate. It was New Year's Eve, almost eight o'clock, and as I watched her lean out her window to order, it was hard to tell if she was happy.
From forehead to chin, the woman's face filled her side mirror, and I studied it. I remember it now and still study it sometimes, trying to figure out what this image from two weeks ago contains that makes me unable to get it out of my head.
I should probably be honest and say this memory is more than an image; its also the feeling of angst that comes from being 18 and in a Taco Bell drive-thru with your mom and brothers on New Year's Eve, instead of out celebrating with friends. And it's the feeling of resenting that angst, because you know you're grown now and shouldn't succumb to whinyness anymore. It's knees pulled up in the seat, trying to forget the last rotten thing a father said, trying to pretend you didn't say anything extra rotten back. Mostly, it's knowing and for once hating how true all the cliches are.
I thought if I could, I'd trade my crumbling kindness for her rusting truck and all her wrinkles, and feel guilty for knowing then the unfortunate answer to her Mona Lisa smile.
But I didn't really think that, not in any articulate way. Self-aspersion will do it's best to keep away from the part of the mind with words, especially if it's deserved. And in my discontent I didn't have the presence of mind to want to shove unhappiness away, only to wonder if this woman had any of her own.
Probably not, I concluded. Here was a woman who looked at home in an environment that, chosen or not, was settled and was her own. She had a companion in the passenger seat, a daughter or a sister-in-law, perhaps. She looked like many of my distant relatives, women of hard-working histories in what used to be hill country, satisfied now to smoke cigarettes and dish out baked beans at family reunions, capable of doing so much but not quite willing to know or chase down what life should have offered and asked of them.
It occurs to me that what might cause me to remember this woman's face and to have noticed it in the first place is the thought that I could someday be her. Not that I aspire to be a frowning woman in a beat-up pick-up truck, or even to ever, ever go to Taco Bell on New Year's Eve again, but just...knowing that time is on my side. A few feet and metaphorical miles away from me, a stranger ordered a burrito and soda and, contrary to everything society would tell you based on appearance, no doubt was kinder to the people in her car and in her life than I had been that day.
That woman's face - her eyes in the mirror - are a promise. And a challenge. And the reason we don't forget the things we struggle over.
From forehead to chin, the woman's face filled her side mirror, and I studied it. I remember it now and still study it sometimes, trying to figure out what this image from two weeks ago contains that makes me unable to get it out of my head.
I should probably be honest and say this memory is more than an image; its also the feeling of angst that comes from being 18 and in a Taco Bell drive-thru with your mom and brothers on New Year's Eve, instead of out celebrating with friends. And it's the feeling of resenting that angst, because you know you're grown now and shouldn't succumb to whinyness anymore. It's knees pulled up in the seat, trying to forget the last rotten thing a father said, trying to pretend you didn't say anything extra rotten back. Mostly, it's knowing and for once hating how true all the cliches are.
I thought if I could, I'd trade my crumbling kindness for her rusting truck and all her wrinkles, and feel guilty for knowing then the unfortunate answer to her Mona Lisa smile.
But I didn't really think that, not in any articulate way. Self-aspersion will do it's best to keep away from the part of the mind with words, especially if it's deserved. And in my discontent I didn't have the presence of mind to want to shove unhappiness away, only to wonder if this woman had any of her own.
Probably not, I concluded. Here was a woman who looked at home in an environment that, chosen or not, was settled and was her own. She had a companion in the passenger seat, a daughter or a sister-in-law, perhaps. She looked like many of my distant relatives, women of hard-working histories in what used to be hill country, satisfied now to smoke cigarettes and dish out baked beans at family reunions, capable of doing so much but not quite willing to know or chase down what life should have offered and asked of them.
It occurs to me that what might cause me to remember this woman's face and to have noticed it in the first place is the thought that I could someday be her. Not that I aspire to be a frowning woman in a beat-up pick-up truck, or even to ever, ever go to Taco Bell on New Year's Eve again, but just...knowing that time is on my side. A few feet and metaphorical miles away from me, a stranger ordered a burrito and soda and, contrary to everything society would tell you based on appearance, no doubt was kinder to the people in her car and in her life than I had been that day.
That woman's face - her eyes in the mirror - are a promise. And a challenge. And the reason we don't forget the things we struggle over.
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