Poetry Friday: Hope & Glory – the 51st (dream) state

Today, Poetry Friday is hosted at NYC Teacher’s place, and the topics are wide, far ranging — and original and beautiful and thought-provoking and heart inspiriting and flat out AWESOME today — really, as they are every Friday. The 7 Imps, however, are the only ones with nude poetry.

Just thought you should know.

excerpt from the 51st (dream) state by Sekou Sundiata:

What if we were Life
Or Liberty
Or the Pursuit of something new?

Between the rocks below
and the stars above

What if we were composed by Love?

And what if we could show
that what we dream
is deeper than what we know?

Suppose if something does not live
in the world
that we long to see
then we make it ourselves
as we want it to be

What if we are Life
Or Liberty
and the Pursuit of something new?

And suppose the beautiful answer
asks the more beautiful question,

Why don’t we get our hopes up too high?
What don’t we get our hopes up to high?
High!

Sekou Sundiata, the eloquent and much loved poet, performer, artist activist and educator, passed away this past Wednesday, and I am grateful to the lovely people who brought his work to my attention. This is from a musical and spoken word performance designed to bring audiences together to envision a more perfect Union, and was still being performed until this week.

So much of what we find, we discover when it is fading or almost lost.What if we began to search sooner?Here’s to hopes set high.

About the author

tanita s. davis is a writer and avid reader who prefers books to most things in the world, including people. That's ...pretty much it, she's very boring and she can't even tell jokes. She is, however, the author of nine books, including Serena Says, Partly Cloudy, Go Figure, Henri Weldon, and the Coretta Scott King honored Mare's War. Look for her new MG, The Science of Friendship in 1/2024 from Katherine Tegen Books.

Comments

  1. Wow. This is much of what has been discussed in my philosophy class this week. The ability to create spaces for shifts in paradigms….which is a complex way of saying “hope high”

    I love this poem.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.