Performed at the On Being gathering in 2018 and published a year earlier in Mrs. Illustration by Judith Clay from Thea’s Tree Marilyn Nelson shines a sidewise gleam on that best, most unifying fact in her stunning poem “The Children’ Moon,” written in the voice of her own mother - one of the first black women to teach at an all-white elementary school, spearheading a classroom of twenty white second-graders at an Air Force base school in Kansas four months after Brown v. In one of her love letters, Margaret Fuller - who laid the foundation of American feminism, advocated for black voting rights generations before women won the vote, and believed in every fiber of her being that genius is “common as light” when given the chance - wrote of “that best fact, the Moon.” A century, a Civil War, and two World Wars after her, amid the golden age of space exploration, the great Italian scientist, humanist, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi considered the spiritual value of our cosmic dreams in his gorgeous essay “The Moon and Man,” insisting that “for good or evil, we are a single people: the more we become conscious of this, the less difficult and long will be humanity’s progress toward justice and peace.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |