February 8, 2021

I have been away from my Daybook page for two years or so, but l intend to go back to it soon, perhaps with this poem and statement that I am about to create. This poem, I feel, is my most important statement on being an American. I believe that African-Americans are our most important race, who have the most to give because of their intelligence, their heart, their wisdom and creativity, and above all their kindness and warmth and capacity for forgiveness, as exhibited by their ancestor’s handling of apartheid in Africa. As a child of immigrants I have experienced racism, and although not nearly as severe as that which African-Americans experience every day, yet I know how damaging this can be, which can only be understood by its victims. I feel that we are living in the ashes of this doomed condition, created by all of us. It will only be through our rising out of these ashes that we will be saved, and I believe the blacks alone can actualize this miraculous recovery, for the good of everyone, but only if we open our hearts and our minds to our fellow brothers and sisters and ask for forgiveness, which I am confident they will accept, in their undaunted nobility, for the good of their humanity and ours, for us to then rise up together to the hand that will joyously touch ours.

PORCH SITTERS       After reading Alice Walker  

I saw them sitting their porches, apart but within;
this place no less theirs than anyone else’s,
and much more theirs than ours—the late comers
who were named by their race, and not Americans,
as were the colored, as they were called then,
but they were not so different in mood and
temperament from us, with robust laughter, and
above all a sweetness, hard earned—qualities
more precious than anything else I was finding
about me, and this was why they were for us
Americans, although different and apart.  

My people had suffered as well, and this, too,
was in me, but it didn’t lift me,
as their joy and suffering had.
It was their music more than our own
that told me of freedom, of a struggle to be
and become, in making a Being,
that in the end would conquer all outward difficulties
and inner weaknesses, within my need to evolve,
and this is what I saw in them that helped
lift me into the highest possibilities that lay
in myself—or as I liked to hear them say, inimitably,
“My own self.”  

My people had come through the genocide,
with memories temporarily disinherited by us,
allowing us to look forward, not back;
to strive for what might be possible for us
in this new land,
which I was trying to do within its
welcoming static, in which I could not move casually,
and would likely never have been at home
if it had not been for their influence and their art,
that included a manner of living
and being with everything, although
white America had stood against them,
and yet by their example and struggle I felt
ennobled and hopeful, and from lessons they
gained, rising up from their suffering,                                                
I have come to accept this land and have worked
to make it my home.