I am finding all sorts of beautiful and heartbreaking and hopeful voices in my travels these days. I am trying to moderate my intake of the interwebs, so I am simply posting without broadcasting.

Today’s poem, “For My People” by Margaret Walker, is presented here in two forms: the written form, as is usual, and above, the poem read by Leah Ward Sears, a justice in the Supreme Court of Atlanta, Georgia.

So many layers when you add another voice to the reading of this, especially this particular voice. The video above is more than just the poem; it’s also a bit about Sears’s life and why she chose this as her favorite poem. She is connected to this poem through her life as a child, and then again in her life’s work.

Please enjoy.

For My People

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama
backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking
and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss
Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn
to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
people who and the places where and the days when, in
memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
were black and poor and small and different and nobody
cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to
be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
play and drink their wine and religion and success, to
marry their playmates and bear children and then die
of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox
Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
people’s pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and
land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time
being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
the dark of churches and schools and clubs and
societies, associations and councils and committees and
conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless
generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control.

As we all navigate what might turn out to be a brand-new world, it helps to go to the water, our place of origin, and to just listen to it meet the shore.

I don’t like to “interpret” a poem, as I feel there is more value in a person coming to it whole, without preconceptions. Please enjoy.

The Adjustments

When coffee first arrived in Europe,
It was referred to as “Arabian wine.”

In turn-of-the-century San Francisco,
The Bank of America began as the Bank of Italy.

When Cortés arrived at Tenochtitlán on November 8, 1519,
Moctezuma II greeted him warmly, and kissed his hand.

All of that. We are amazed by the smallest of things
Coming before us, the facts that seem so strange to us now

As we live in their opposite rooms.
In 1935, reports say, when Isaac Bashevis Singer

Arrived in New York, he was thirty years old
And could speak only three words in English:

“Take a chair.”
But then he learned other words. It helped.