Thursday, November 18
ELEUTHERIA There was so little to say of the iridescent grackles above the court house or the architecture of secrets below like a fragile vocabulary, or the inundation of idols when winter thawed, whatever was hidden out of loneliness. But, what if we were changed at least once by nights of rain, by drunken bees in a glade of tufted vetch, by the fly-tormented psalms of Blake edging further into the breath of our knowing? This is a country with a single dream--- all the counties and all the town meetings and all the demonstrations amount to a sole creation. Last night I pictured our shadows liberated from human forms. How do we know the color of freedom? I've a face the shade of maple pressed like an encyclic leaf in a book from another century no one reads. I am imagining your fingernails, the great potential of your profile, how you may never hear the gentlest parts of my tumbling out of clouds: sometimes we call it beauty, we, the martyrs. (Major Jackson)