“I believe we are the creative imagination of our futures. I understand thought to be the poetic spark from which all things manifest. Thoughts are architectural, building words into language, constructing societies that define Earth’s social ecosystems.
As a poet laureate, writer/educator, a member of my community, as a humble student of the universe, I am charged, and challenged with a generational responsibility — utilize literary arts to illuminate, and clarify, cultivate the marriage between poetry and analysis.
In this time of emotional and physical ache, pandemic grief, and racial upheaval, in this moment of cultural plate tectonics shifting paradigms into the insecure glint of promise—poetry pours over us like a blessed covering. It is the amplifier, earbuds to the heart. Poetry is a microscope, magnifying the hidden, and the hazardous. Poetry ensures electromagnetic pull, drawing out, dragging from us—our muffled best and muzzled worst.
We need our words to be enlightened art: lyrical Earthly lullabies, painting, sculpting, fabric-working new threads of freedom. We need our words to be science: analyzing, dissecting, deconstructing obsolete paradigms of injustice. We need poetry to arrest the current of cruel gravity, words rising like a tsunami from the ocean of *deferred dreams—to elevate our evolving humanity— onward. ”
*Langston Hughes reference
