Love Letta to de Worl'
by Frank X Walker
I love you world.
Love your seven different faces.
Love your healing waters
wide and deep.
Love the thing you have
with the sun and the moon
and what it teaches us
about companionship,
about change,
about revolution.
Love the mirror at your navel,
how it shows off your hemispheres,
illustrating important lessons
about balance,
about reflection,
about centering ourselves.
Love how much like little worlds
we are. How our earthquake
is your shiver, your sneeze a tsunami,
an avalanche, a mudslide.
When you have hot flashes
we call it drought.
You once covered your whole body
with ice to cool a fever.
When you weep, daily,
over our continued ignorance,
our epic failures and petty squabbles
—our every transgression,
your waters
break and we are born again.
Love your outreach, our mutual attraction,
your gravitational pull.
For every treasure we steal
from your womb
you send us hail and thunderstorms.
When we invent poisons and no antidotes
and build monuments to ourselves
you send tornadoes and hurricanes
to remind us of how small we truly are.
And yet, every day you continue to humble,
inspire, and move us to tears
with your natural beauty.
Our own efforts to mimic your vistas
are what we dare call art and dance,
music and poetry,
architecture and language,
and love.
It is the only thing we have ever gotten right.
We can't pass the course on humanity
if we keep failing the lessons
on harmony
and until we unlearn fear and hate.
Thank you, world, for this
open-book exam before us,
for still believing
we are worthy of your love.
We who love you black already know
that everything we do to you
we also do to ourselves…
The Englewood Project is a city-based culmination of Love Letter To the World, which also includes … cross-stitches! The Englewood Project ensured that we would have at least one photograph of each of the 130 designs based on Frank X Walker’s poem.
