January 19: 2018 Women's March, Robert Hayden, "Frederick Douglass"

This Sunday, people are joining together once again for the Women's March.  Last year, after the inauguration of Donald Trump, hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets in a show of protest and solidarity for women's rights and issues.  It happened all over the globe.  Washington, D. C.  Paris.  London.  Helsinki.

Tonight, I share a poem in honor of the 2018 Women's March.  It's a poem of hope and strength, written in the voice of the great African American writer and activist, Frederick Douglass.  It digs deep.  Reminds us of the need for action in the face of injustice.  The struggle isn't over until the dream is made real in our children and our children's children.

Saint Marty believes in this dream.

Frederick Douglass

by:  Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,   

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,   

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,   

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more   

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:   

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro   

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world   

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,   

this man, superb in love and logic, this man   

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,   

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives   

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.