Be Encouraged: The Poetry of Progress

As spoken at the First Existentialist Congregation Celebration of Life on Sunday, July 13th 2014.

Be Encouraged:  The Poetry of Progress

By Michael Otieno Molina

I am blessed to be with you fellow sojourners to truth and justice, you who are committed to action in fellowship, you who have built in this stone chalice a congregation, a gumbo of souls co-mingling in commitment to freedom from a gathering house that reminds me of a stop on the underground railroad every time I pass it.  And the light of compassion flashing in your eyes rhymes with the time-tempered rocks that surround us, each one like us, an individually placed witness to the power of people.   

Be Encouraged:  The Poetry of Progress  

And my hope for our time together is in that title.  I am here to encourage us to encourage ourselves to encourage each other to make poetry out of our individual and collective progress.  Be Encouraged.  Progress is poetry.

The didactic, diverse thinker W.K. Pedia calls poetry a form of literature that uses the aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to ostensible meaning.  In other words, poetry uses the evocative, layered nature of language to suckle meaning from the mundane, to flood the minutia with the meta.  Poetry merges form and function to help us understand what we feel.  Poetry is language evolved.

And language is the first human technology.   In language, humans converted the energy of grunts and moans into words the way computers converted ones and zeros into information.  Language was the Internet before electricity, it is where we searched stories for meaning, for joy, for truth, for understanding.  Language bore the stories that taught fire and taught medicine and taught philosophy.  Language is the driver of human evolution, the all spark, the engine of human understanding and the catalyst of human potential.  Language is the mortar of civilization and war is happens when language fails.

The great peace-maker, theologian, philosopher, and cultural historian Thomas Berry once noted:  “It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story”.  

And I believe we would all agree that we need a new story.

We are in a world of trouble

Where war reigns supreme in the middle east

blood pours down the drains of city streets

immigrant children called aliens on their own planet

by Americans weary with shrinking opportunity

We are in a world of trouble

Where violence runs hot in the hands of teens

Who Post rape videos proudly

And cold in the hearts of people turned commodities of the incarceration industry

Where media monopolies push corporate hegemony into the gears of democracy

We are in a world of trouble

Our earth is swollen with the waste of insatiable consumption

And as we wade through distraction

Bitter in detached connection

Where the world awaits our fingertips

With a mood change at a channel switch

And consequence has come to this

We are desensitized and comfortably numb

While death and destruction run amok among our children

We are in a world of trouble

And we who want the world to progress have to change our story from only powerfully pointing out what we are against and clearly calling out what’s wrong to artfully attracting people to what we are for and building the beautiful on what’s right.  We need our story to become poetry.

But today

I am encouraged

Just look at what we have done

we have filled this world

with a harvest of freedom

each one of us, a dream realized

every moment of our lives

an instance of oppression defied

every breath and utterance

a reflection of the resilience of life

despite being, terrorized

ostracized and denied opportunity to thrive

our ancestors survived

reborn and alive in us

so trust

we must

be encouraged

Poetry is a sublimely designed vehicle, a finely tuned engine, and a master-skilled driver of ideas.  And, personally, I am committed to rhyming poetry because it sounds good, because it is easier to recall, and because it is beautiful, and like most folks, I like to dwell on beauty, to look for beauty in everything from ashes to dust.    And there is another reason many of us drawn rhyme so much.

A little, square woman, Merriam Webster Online’, writes that Rhyme is the correspondence in the terminal sounds of a composition.  The correspondence in the terminal sounds of a composition.  If we take poetic license to deconstruct that definition and reconstruct it outside the realm of poetry or even language, we can draw an analogy that speaks to the power of rhyme, poetry, and language as a core forces for understanding and catalyzing progress.  In other words let’s break this down.

Rhyme is the correspondence in the terminal sounds of a composition. 

A Correspondence is a close similarity, connection, or equivalence… something that one thing shares with another.  Could be a value, an experience, a moment in time.  It is a point of unity between things.  Let’s keep that.  Correspondence is A POINT OF UNITY BETWEEN THINGS.  A POINT OF UNITY BETWEEN THINGS.

And Rhyme is the correspondence in the terminal sounds of a composition.  So lets unpack terminal next.

Terminal, the meticulous Ms. Lady Merriam also tells us, Terminal means forming or situated at an end or extremity of something, such as a transportation route or a station along that route. 

Or alternatively a terminal can be a point of connection for closing an electric circuit.  In other words, terminal refers to an ending that serves as the starting point to something else. Terminal means TRANSITIONAL, let’s keep that.

Rhyme is the correspondence in the terminal sounds of a composition.  So what is a composition? 

Composition is the nature of something's ingredients or constituents; the way in which a whole or mixture is made up.   Or alternatively it a work of music, literature, or art.  So composition is THE MAKE UP OF A CREATION.

AND Rhyme is the correspondence in the terminal sounds of a composition.  So after breaking that down, let’s put it back together.  Rhyme is the A POINT OF UNITY BETWEEN THINGS IN TRANSITION AS THEY MAKE UP A CREATION.  Rhyme is A POINT OF UNITY BETWEEN THINGS IN TRANSITION AS THEY MAKE UP A CREATION. 

The present rhymes in two directions with its past and its future.  Molecules rhyme in the many forms of matter, atoms rhyme in fusion and in fission, cells rhyme in anything that’s living.  The artist rhymes the real and the imagined the way the builder rhymes the blueprint with the edifice.         

I rhyme my father, my mother.  Two teachers who died giving their present lives as a gift to the future.  I rhyme their mentors, and their muses in whatever they learned from them and taught to me.  I rhyme their love to my children.  As if my parents love endlessly in the arms with which I hold my children and in the arms with which they may one day hold their children. 

We all rhyme with some ancient ancestor who wore our faces, spoke our voices, and walked our gait in a day under the same sun, breathing the same oxygen in the breath you took as these words were spoken.   

Rhyme is like that.  Rhyme is, like life, symmetry, balance, and the repletion of repetition.  Life is rhyme.  And any progress in this life must rhyme with the core, timeless needs that all people in all places at all times share:  self-expression, togetherness, purpose.  Progress, as it rhymes what we are with what we could be, progress is rooted in where we are and pulls us forward to where we should be. 

Tell somebody 

Be encouraged

each of us

could have shut up

in the face of injustice

but instead we stepped up

and kept up the mission the elders left us

and the world is so messed up

sometimes we get fed up

about ready to head up out the door

but then we connect up

hear stories that refresh us

and remind us of just what it is we are fighting for

Tell somebody to Be Encouraged

We are fighting for the planet.  And thankfully, thankfully our planet is round.   So if you walk your mind out of these doors and go left, all the way to left, as far left as you can go, you can greet your neighborhood Black Blocker with a warm “Anarchism is order, Government is chaos” in the morning.  Alternatively, if you leave this place and walk your mind right, all the way right, as far right as you can go, you can say “minimum government, maximum freedom” to your friendly neighborhood Libertarian at the end of the day.  And they, being next-door neighbors, can be heard arguing round the clock across the narrow alley of ideology between them.  Thankfully we are on a round planet and the extreme left and extreme right can yell at each other from across that dark alley.  Imagine them rhyming slogans back and forth at each other

Larry Libertarian:  Free Minds will make Free Markets

Arnie Anarchist:  Property is Theft, Eat the Rich

Minimum Government, Maximum Freedom

Political power comes from the barrel of a gun

If your aren’t Libertarian, you aren’t paying attention

The direction, insurrection.  The solution, revolution.

And in all the confusion, there is still rhyme, A POINT OF UNITY BETWEEN THINGS IN TRANSITION AS THEY MAKE UP A CREATION.  And in the rhyme there is a radical center, a radical center where white is a color and man is a myth, where we are all people of color, gender unspecific. Where humans are animals, and the planet is us all.  Where religion listens when science calls.  Where science acknowledges its limits.  There is a radical center.

There is a radical center that holds us together.  It is  radical in the mathematical sense.  Meaning at the root.

And the root is clenched to the earth, balled up in twists like the veins in a fist raised in a mass of freedom fighters who would rather work than wish for Freedom.

Tell somebody Be encouraged

For We who believe in freedom shall not rest until it comes

And Freedom isnt a buzz word of pop philosophy

Freedom is the difference between a public school and a for profit penitentiary

Freedom aint the choice between coke zero or diet pepsi

Freedom is being healthy enough to enjoy your body

Freedom isnt choosing between comedians Stewart and Colbert or clowns Beck and O’reilly

Freedom is getting information instead of ideology

Freedom learns from it all

from the right to the left

to consider it all then take the best and leave the rest

we can learn a little bit from capitalists about how to catalyze

And we can learn a whole lot from socialists about how to prioritize

We can learn from politicians about how to compromise

We can learn from revolutionaries about how to lock our eyes on the prize

In freedom even perceived enemies

Have something to teach

Every heart and mind

Is within freedom’s reach

Tell somebody Be encouraged

Every point on a circle is a rhyme, A POINT OF UNITY BETWEEN THINGS IN TRANSITION AS THEY MAKE UP A CREATION.  And rhyme is why your children love hip hop and why you loved rock, why so many who love Dr. Suess, also love Dr. Spock.  Rhyme is for dreamers and I ain’t the only one who believes there’s some reason Lennin sounds like Lennon and the cannon wields a cannon and the only way to set the mind free is to hip hop hibby to the hibby to hip hip a hoppa you don’t stop a rockin to the bang bang boogie to up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie to be.   

Yes even when rhymes are forced, they are at least silly.  

But believe it or not, there are those among us who look down on rhyme as childish and simplistic.  The same folks, I suspect, who look down on the insect, the spider perched above in a galaxy of web, spun from it’s own body… the same folks who look down on the lizard whose every skin cell is an individual artist in a symphony of metachrosis, who even look down on the dogs whose love they cherish.  What fools we can be when convinced of our own garish complexity. 

But the most powerful poetry is the simple symbol, especially when it is rhymed with the infinite, divine, purpose of progress.

Every movement for progress has been rooted in simple symbols.  Ghandi in his Khadi at the loom spinning resistance to the British exploitation of an Indian cotton boom.  The South African marching a dance to freedom.  Freedom Riders singing Southern terrorism to submission. 

Progress is poetry, each one of us a syllable, a word in a phrase of days done, of days to come.

Tell somebody Be encouraged

Because there aint no power like the power of the people

And the power of the people don’t stop

And we won’t stop at a black president

Won’t pause for a promotion

Won’t bow down or mumble humbly

We gon cause some commotion

Filing motions to cease and desist against racists

Composing policy and voting

We are in motion and wont stop

Till we rid our cities of crime and killer cops

We won’t stop with non-profits

We will be present in government

And prepared to take to the streets

From Main St to Wall St. to Martin Luther King

You will hear us on your radio and see us on your tv

We resist the inertia of his-story

And its tendency to tame ambitions

Yeah we have come a long way

but not nearly completed our mission

Listen to your breath

That’s the sound of Ms. Moses Tubman in the woods

The sound John Brown plotting

And jim crow rotting like he should

Feel your heart beat

That’s children growing brilliant and strong

That’s women unbound by society

And men dancing down from the their thrones

I wish you could see you

A ménage of hues

With treasures of talents and tools

The truth

Empowered to renew and rejuvenate

who refuse to resuscitate the

Old American ways

that confuse and reduce

A human being

To a gender, class, or race

We’ve come to reject and redefine

Politics as we know it

With is sick, twisted, and nihilistic

Fear-based, hate-laced, adversarial rhetoric

Be encouraged

We are long overdue for a new American anthem, a new story of our highest aspiration.  The Star Spangled Banner was written in 1814 by 37 year old lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key who in commemorating a battle put a poem to an English drinking song and thus was born the Star Spangled Banner, a war ode to a nation young and strong. 

“Oh say can you see…”

WE KICKED THEIR BUTTS AND WE’LL KICK ANYBODIES BUTTS SO DON’T MESS WITH US.

But there is another American anthem.  A rhyming shadow to the American dream, cooler and wiser as it is shielded from patriotism gleam.  It was written in 1900 by a 35 year old lawyer and poet named James Weldon Johnson in celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s legacy.  It is an ode to progress from America’s His-Story. 

Lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring…

In other words

WE HAVE COME A LONG WAY, BUT WE HAVE A LONG WAY TO GO AND THE ONLY WAY TO GET THERE IS TOGETHER

Now that’s an anthem if I ever heard one.  A quintessential rhyme, A POINT OF UNITY BETWEEN THINGS IN TRANSITION AS THEY MAKE UP A CREATION and it is as American as America gets. 

So you have long had the raw material for a new anthem, and now you have me, a 30 something lawyer and poet from a nation the founding fathers could not foresee, a glimpse of tomorrow’s truth, an African creole Filipino mestizo German Jew with indigenous roots.

Tell somebody to Be encouraged

This is what democracy looks like

We are power to the people

We are the future in the flesh

We are the hands that weave dignity

The minds that command respect

We dream in color

And we’ve come to wake the world up

We reach out and connect like webs

form networks to keep in touch

We destroy the constructs that divide us 

We build bridges of unity

From the country to the city

We are the world community

Tell somebody Be encouraged

I work at Clarkston Community Center, located in Clarkston, Georgia, the most diverse square mile on the planet Earth.  Clarkston, a refugee resettlement town where an 8 year old Iraqi child I know who arrived in April, a refugee of the current crisis, cries as he tries so hard to understand what we are saying.  Where a 14 year old Congolese girl, when asked how she got here  mutters bluntly, “They killed my parents.”  Where a Somali girl’s hijab flutters as she jumps a rope turned on one end by the fifth of nine African American movement children and on the other by a ruddy Asian Burmese muslim. 

These are new Americans.  And they are all here in the place that took them in or has been their home for generations.  They are our future and they are strong and resilient, compassionate and brilliant, giving and living from their hearts. 

Be encouraged

You can feel change in its skin

Wrapped around your hands

Echoed In the world you envision

Moving through this room

In the boom of silent intention

made real by commitment and necessity bred invention

be encouraged

Keep loving in the midst of the struggle

Keep hoping in the twists of trouble

keep singing and playing

Dancing and praying

and whatever brings you joy and defeats your fear

keep exercising your mind

read to feed your ideas 

keep seeking the divine in its glory

And in the little things like us here

We worker bees

hustling for humanity

Be encouraged

The revolution will be rhymed and it is coming right on time

So be you in the streets stomping for justice

or in power writing policy

be you in schools deconstructing ignorance

or as artist creating space for the visionary

whatever you be

be encouraged

If you can speak

Speak poetry

Make your work a poem

If you can walk

Walk a song

Even if you walk alone

If all you do is listen

Listen for the truth

Listen for encouragement

For whatever it is you do

Rhyme the history of progress

With your own resilience

And watch our dream world come true

lift your little bit of this 7.178 billion

and know

that we are building

a world for our children’s, children’s,

children’s children…

Be encouraged