glad it still resonated even with all the typos haha. there are days i regret not taking my mentor’s advice to go into creative writing. but i still write poetry. i write a poem every day just to keep myself good at writing poetry. i started doing that December of 2024 when Nikki Giovanni passed away from lung cancer.
i ran into a display at a chain bookstore of her poetry. the display was named “Books that shaped the nation” and it just struck me as so odd because to me, she was both my hero and my friend. someone i looked up to and admired, but also someone i always happy to catch up with. it’s also so curious to me that she’s the only poet from where i grew up that the nation knows when so many of us write poetry. i will grant, she was the best it amongst all us, but she put in so much work trying to build a platform for the rest of us to stand on but the institutions she worked against were only ever interested in her.
on some level though, i’m glad i didn’t make a career in art. i get to go to the activist meetings i live for and make the art alongside them that i want to make without anyone telling me it needs to be more or less this or that. i’ll die someday, my poems kept only by my neighbors, but at least i’ll know those neighbors knew i loved them and they’ll have my poems to prove it. i don’t need a wikipedia page to have a legacy. i need children who can go down to the river and drink the water and eat the fish. if we never allowed another pollutant into the river ever again, it would be 60 years before this could come to pass. but someday, mark my words, it shall be so, and my soul will live in that river, up in the paper birch, for all of time to come
Dude, that was beautiful. You have a way with words
glad it still resonated even with all the typos haha. there are days i regret not taking my mentor’s advice to go into creative writing. but i still write poetry. i write a poem every day just to keep myself good at writing poetry. i started doing that December of 2024 when Nikki Giovanni passed away from lung cancer.
i ran into a display at a chain bookstore of her poetry. the display was named “Books that shaped the nation” and it just struck me as so odd because to me, she was both my hero and my friend. someone i looked up to and admired, but also someone i always happy to catch up with. it’s also so curious to me that she’s the only poet from where i grew up that the nation knows when so many of us write poetry. i will grant, she was the best it amongst all us, but she put in so much work trying to build a platform for the rest of us to stand on but the institutions she worked against were only ever interested in her.
on some level though, i’m glad i didn’t make a career in art. i get to go to the activist meetings i live for and make the art alongside them that i want to make without anyone telling me it needs to be more or less this or that. i’ll die someday, my poems kept only by my neighbors, but at least i’ll know those neighbors knew i loved them and they’ll have my poems to prove it. i don’t need a wikipedia page to have a legacy. i need children who can go down to the river and drink the water and eat the fish. if we never allowed another pollutant into the river ever again, it would be 60 years before this could come to pass. but someday, mark my words, it shall be so, and my soul will live in that river, up in the paper birch, for all of time to come