TO THE CHILDREN, RISING UP

My father and his father and his father all did the same thing.

There is a pattern in generational energy, you see.

Where the young are spirited and free to roam

And the older, even the frail, sit back and watch them in their foolishness.

Let them play, they say, but soon they’ll be back.

Let them dream of changing things and making the world a better place,

But they’ll be back.

Back right here to where there is ease and comfort.

What is familiar will call them back to the bosom.

And they weren’t wrong.

It is love personified to fall into the arms of loving family.

It is love, safety, money, savings accounts, job connections and affirmation.

To see the nod from aging prophets, saying that everything is all right when it’s not:

This is the path to going back to home to find the warm sofa, the panting dog on the front porch.

But what happens when the children rise up and do not return home?

What happens when they see

Burning cities

Lynchings

The seared skin on their friends who have been branded like cattle

What happens if we do not come back to the bosom?

I will tell you.

Your insides will be razed, my dear.

You will spend your days yearning for the comforts of ignorance,

You will feel the deepest kind of inner suffering, to know that there is no path to peace when your beloveds are shot down at a crosswalk.

You will spend your days trying to reconcile the warm bosom of home that turns its eyes away from the reality of oppression, racism and bigotry.

And you will cry out to unsee the unforgettable.

You will beg for it all to end, to return to the ignorance, to return to the days when you did not know the searing pain of all that beckons you back into the bosom of blindness.

But you must link arms, stand guard and press forward.

Do not be deterred by offers to return to the old, the oppressive, the false.

Be renewed at the site of her beautiful brown eyes, his caramel skin, the bouncy curls on the top of that giggling child’s head.

Be refreshed by the energy that carried you away from home

Fall into the bosom that holds you without tiring and says:

All for thee, my beloved brother,

All for thee, my aching sister,

All for thee, my darling children

All for thee, I will give my efforts, my whole heart and all the lives that I am given

All for thee, I shall offer my body.

All for thee, I shall offer my shelter.

All for thee, I will offer my resources.

All for thee, I will raise my voice, to the heavens, the mountains, to the oceans

All for thee, until we are set free.