*a poem from Gwendolyn Brooks.
Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.
You need not die today.
Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.
Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.
Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Kansas, in 1917, and raised in Chicago. She was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Annie Allen (Harper, 1949), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. She also wrote and edited numerous other books. In 1985, she was the first black woman appointed as ‘consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress’, a post now known as Poet Laureate. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. Brooks lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.
How do we keep our young people looking forward, and – most of all – alive? It feels right now as if we – adults – are failing them terribly, setting bad examples and abandoning what is good and right, including saving this beautiful planet for them. And what must trans-kids be feeling right now? Adolescence is hard enough without being targeted for what you are. It gets better. It really does. I thought about killing myself for decades, at times it was acute, at others simply a throbbing, ever-present bruise in my brain and heart. It amazes me I ever felt and thought that way, but I did; it was real and omnipresent, oppressive, heavy; my chest literally felt as though a gravestone had been placed upon it at birth. Eventually my hunger for life and a deep, abiding love for myself – whatever my challenges were – reasserted itself, beating the blues and the burdens of my childhood away. I am so grateful. Stay alive, I want to say to all those who struggle with suicidal thoughts, just stay alive one more day, one more week, breathe, let death wait. Let him wait.