“…the instrument behind all this poetry…..yea…U don’t really wanna know bout the degradation it took to straighten my pen into this position…what it took to have the courage to wear my feelings on my sleeves….and to bleed words for a living.”
Tag: struggle
Struggle
“We must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
What I love most about this quote is that struggle is such a powerful teacher. It passes down the knowledge of self, which without such cannot be obtained. If not for the hardships many of us have been through we would not have understood who we were as individuals. It is a healing experience to transform the mind by having endured struggle, pain, obstacles. No discipline seems pleasant at the time we receive it, but what in creation produces a greater reward than enduring struggle? Show me a better teacher than pain.
Guest Feature – Exerpt from Ntozake Shange
i can’t hear anythin
but maddening screams
& the soft strains of death
& you promised me
you promised me…
somebody/anybody
sing a black girl’s song
bring her out to know herself
to know you
but sing her rhythms
carin/struggle/hard times
sing her song of life
she’s been dead so long
closed in silence so long
she doesn’t know the sound
of her own voice
her infinite beauty
she’s half-notes scattered
without rhythm/no tune
sing her sighs
sing the song of her possibilities
sing a righteous gospel
let her be born
let her be born
and handled warmly.
Spoken Words for Silent Wars
I speak for the people in places where hope
hangs its strings in the crack filled streets of Harlem
where iron style floors and bronze heavens
are polluted with “I told you so’s”
morgues loitered with toy soldiers
who died believing
defending a street corner
was keeping it real
Hopeless
The blazing echo of darkness as it hovers its deception over welcoming eyes….
is it easiest to speak of morning than to actually believe that it exists?
are we walking contradictions….
do we fill our hearts with hope and yet…are we hopeless?
The PBS Blog 