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i
From Negro History week
to Black History Month,
has been a perilous sojourn-struggle
along the Woodson journey:
Once again
we pause to slice swollen keloids,
opening old wounds of flooded memories—
flowing a river of bloody truths of our story.
Yet, while elders cast compassionate hooks
to reel in nourishing steadfastness,
the children sit, anchored along the banks,
immersed in comic book fantasies:
We fishers among schools of young stones
still, have many bottom dwellers
to yet reel in, to fill our empty buckets.
ii
With our children let us plunge
into the rivers of memories
filling our buckets
quenching thirsty minds
with the watered truths of ourstory,
washing away the lies and deceit of history;
that they may ride the sea of life
with visions of the journey-struggle’s shores
in their awareness; leaving Nintendo-like games
behind them as they find Crossword puzzle
solutions to the liberation that lies before them:
Indeed, when you train up the children
in the way they should go, they will never
depart from the awareness of who
and whose they are, in greatness and and grace.
