clips and drips and waterfalls

She flashes rays of darkness and the whiteness does not overcome her because in her is life and her life is flesh like midnight.

There are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things, some with names so generous as to kick the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon, stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks at the market. Think of that. The long night, the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah. But look; my niece is running through a field calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel and at the end of my block is a basketball court. I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.

-Ross Gay, from “Sorrow is Not My Name”

The river is famous to the fish. The loud voice is famous to silence,   which knew it would inherit the earth   before anybody said so.   The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds   watching him from the birdhouse.   The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.   The idea you carry close to your bosom   is famous to your bosom.   The boot is famous to the earth,   more famous than the dress shoe,   which is famous only to floors. The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it   and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.   I want to be famous to shuffling men   who smile while crossing streets,   sticky children in grocery lines,   famous as the one who smiled back. I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,   or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,   but because it never forgot what it could do.

All those days you felt like dust, like dirt, as if all you had to do was turn your face toward the wind and be scattered to the four corners

or swept away by the smallest breath as insubstantial—

Did you not know what the Holy One can do with dust?

This is the day we freely say we are scorched.

This is the hour we are marked by what has made it through the burning.

This is the moment we ask for the blessing that lives within the ancient ashes, that makes its home inside the soil of this sacred earth.

So let us be marked not for sorrow. And let us be marked not for shame. Let us be marked not for false humility or for thinking we are less than we are

but for claiming what God can do within the dust, within the dirt, within the stuff of which the world is made, and the stars that blaze in our bones, and the galaxies that spiral inside the smudge we bear.

flickers like a match held to a dry branch, and the whole world goes up in orange and gold.

I want all of our daughters and sons to see that this, too, is their inheritance. I want them to know that it’s never been just about the Benjamins; it’s about the Tubmans too. And I want them to help do their part to ensure that America is a place where every single child can make of her life what she will.

That’s what twenty-first century feminism is about: the idea that when everybody is equal, we are all more free.