I Support All People On Earth Who

Maybe We Try Too Hard To Be Remembered, Waking To The Glowing Yellow Disc In Ignorance, Swearing That Today Will Be The Day, Today We Will Make Something Of Our Lives. What If We Are So Busy Searching For Worth That We Miss The Sapphire Sky And Cackling Blackbird. What Else Is Missing? Maybe Our Steps Are Too Straight And Our Paths Too Narrow And Not Overlapping. Maybe When They Overlap Someone In Another Country Lights A Candle, A Couple Resolves Their Argument, A Young Man Puts Down His Silver Gun And Walks Away.

During The Gulf War, I Remember Two Little Third Grade Girls Saying To Me - After I Read Them Some Poems By Writers In Iraq - 'you Know, We Never Thought About There Being Children In Iraq Before.' And I Thought, 'well Those Poems Did Their Job, Because Now They'll Think About Everything A Little Bit Differently.'

I Think The Job Of Writing And Literature Is To Encourage Each One Of Us To Believe That We're Living In A Story.

I Grew Up In St. Louis In A Tiny House Full Of Large Music - Mahalia Jackson And Marian Anderson Singing Majestically On The Stereo, My German-american Mother Fingering 'the Lost Chord' On The Piano As Golden Light Sank Through Trees, My Palestinian Father Trilling In Arabic In The Shower Each Dawn.

Since There Is No Place Large Enough To Contain So Much Happiness, You Shrug, You Raise Your Hands, And It Flows Out Of You Into Everything You Touch. You Are Not Responsible. You Take No Credit, As The Night Sky Takes No Credit For The Moon, But Continues To Hold It, And Share It, And In That Way, Be Known.