In this season of pain and protest, I have been watching my kids and yours with awe and admiration. Their rallying cries, their impassioned pleas, their lifted voices, their posterboard signs — they are using language to try to make sense of the nonsensical, to speak truth to power, to reveal their hearts and minds, and then to disrupt, teach and influence by way of those revelations. They are poets, of the highest order.
Unexcused absence
It is safer to walkout
than to hide inside.
Voices young and small
together make a fierce roar —
listen up, people!
They’re not asking much —
is it really outrageous?
They don’t want to die.
The power in the first two…and the pathos in the third…
Three cheers for the young ones who will change the world!!
Yes, lots of tears and three cheers!
It gives me chills to watch the priorities shift: it used to be that GPA was the end all, and now, the cry is simpler, and more horrifying: let us live. Let us live for that future we were promised.
Dear God, we need to get this right.
We really do. I want to believe, but it’s hard….