[applause]

Drew Lanham: Good morning.

Audience: Good morning.

Drew Lanham: “Above all else, guard your hearts, for everything you do flows from it.” Proverbs 4 and 23. I walk in the paths of those who first knew this land and honor their presence now. I stand in the echoes of the ancestors’ prayers. I rise to the challenge of better through their hopes and earnest supplications.

I want to share with you this morning a poem generated by this conversation with Krista during the height, yes, the height, of our united struggle, our united isolations, our shared loneliness, the COVID pandemic. Yes, as Krista said, we were distanced, but this was a close talk. And so this poem I’m calling, a kinship folk poem as it grows by association, kind of like one of those weird friendship cakes that goes from door to door. My belief that to talk is to touch, and so I hope that these words are hearty handshakes, that they are gentle hugs, that they are hands folded in front of our hearts.

 

Joy is the justice 

we give ourselves. 

It is Maya’s bird 

sung free past the prison bars, 

holding spirits bound— 

without due process, 

without just cause.

 

Joy is the steady running stream, 

rites sprung up 

from moss-soft ground— 

under hanging trees, 

nourished by blood, 

grown through pain, 

now seeping sweet, 

equality’s demands made clear 

from sea 

to shining sea, 

north to south, 

west to east, 

flyover heartland in between.

 

Joy is the truth, 

the crooked lies hammered straight, 

whitewashed myths 

wiped away. 

Joy is Stone Mountain

—just stone. 

Rushmore 

—no more. 

Joy is giving the eagles 

their mountains back. 

Joy is returning to sacred the people’s 

holy lands. 

 

Joy is the paradise 

we can claim 

right here, 

right now. 

No vengeful gods

craving prayer,

No tenth and tithes to pay,

No repenter’s cover charge—

no dying required to get in. 

 

Joy is the sunrise 

breaking through night’s remains, 

shown new 

on a shell-wracked shore; 

a fresh tide-scrubbed world 

redeems what was, 

to is. 

 

Joy is no bombs 

falling on your children’s heads 

or mine 

because of what you believe or I don’t.

 

Joy is on the wings of wind birds, 

the wedge of wimble in flight, 

the curved-beaks’ cries 

of wandering curlews, 

stitching top of the world 

to bottom. 

 

Joy is the soul 

underneath the journey, 

gaze snagged on wonder, 

not knowing final destination, 

yet blessed as a witness,

moored to ground. 

Joy is worshipful tears 

dripped into grateful smile. 

 

Joy is Rachel’s silent spring, 

an unquieted 

world not come to pass. 

Joy is the season 

dripping ripe full 

of wood thrush song. 

 

Joy is all the Black birds, 

flocked together, 

too many to count, 

too many to name, 

every one different 

from the next, 

swirling in singularity 

across amber-purpled sky.

 

Joy is being loved 

up close, 

not just from the untouchable distances 

or at arm’s length 

for who we are 

or might become. 

 

Joy is the last song 

drifting in 

as dark curtains fall; 

the sparrows vesper offering, 

whistles laying 

through pine-templed woods, 

requiem in me-minor— 

church in a cathedral nature built. 

No stained glass. 

No pulpit. 

No pews.

Altars everywhere. 

Just listen.

Just look. 

 

Joy is the return, 

the wandering bird 

landed here again, 

from who knows where, 

to rest, 

to give our flagging spirits tailwinds. 

 

Joy is the healing, 

broken dreams restored— 

Soaring.

Bra Langston’s words 

kettling higher 

on hopes, 

drifting ever upwards 

on ragged-mid-lined rhyme,

syncopated verse. 

 

Joy is us mattering.

Joy is equity. 

No equivocation. 

Joy is actually seeing color, 

hue not blinded by privilege,

he piety of claiming you don’t. 

 

Joy is Baldwin’s grin. 

 

Joy is the respect you put on my name with no N in the beginning or I or double G or E in the middle, or that R rolled hard at the end even if I’m not there to hear you when you say it to family or friends. 

 

Joy is the sharp eye watching little brown sparrows and the kind one focused on little brown babies too. 

 

Joy is the generations come before surviving the struggles, somehow staying strong in the midst of withering storms from shackled ancestors through Jim Crowed back doors to gerrymandered chokeholds now.

 

Joy is the payoff for those off and down, but never out. Grit is in the genes and boiling hot in the pot. Indigo blues sung to rebellion over rice, cotton stained blood red, “Making a way out of no way,” like the old folks say, uplift, rejoice. 

 

Joy is the thriving of a people who won’t die in the midst of all this dying. 

 

Joy is the mind beyond the skull box, not wasted on convention or what they said was right. 

 

Joy is the breaths one followed easy by the next, not begging for air or asking your mama’s ghost for help. 

 

Joy is the lungs, ins and outs with no one there to serve or protect. 

 

Joy is the maybe, the possibilities of empathy between strangers. 

 

Joy is the drive with no traffic stops, with no taillights out, with no tint technically too dark, with no speed traps, with no demeaning, “Yes, sirs, Officer sirs,” no hands at two and 10, no wondering where your registration is.

 

Joy is the flashing cruiser’s light not meant for me. 

 

Joy is the good news without dead names. 

 

Joy is school without fear. 

 

Joy is a night of sleep in your very own bed without shots in the dark, no more waking up full of lead. 

 

Joy is the morning jog without being hunted down. 

 

Joy is getting to eat your Skittles, drinking your tea without harassment. 

 

Joy is no chokeholds, no more murderous knees. 

 

Joy is the loss we take to gain monuments to traitors torn down, lost causes finally buried, never again to be found. 

 

Joy is the decent act, the kind word, the opposite of hypocrisy. Enough said. 

 

Joy is not your great again. 

 

Joy is the prairie where billowed, cloud and wild grass meet, where the soaring hawks glide from there to hear wherever is its own choice to make, no border crossing checks.

 

Joy is the surrender to faith of push to trust and lift. Giving over to Sister Tony’s command to ride the air, to float on a wish. 

 

Joy is my grandmamma’s work-worn hands, seed thrown through gnarled fingers on cold ground for the snowbirds. She pitied, “Because it’s cold baby. See how they eat.” 

 

Joy is all the wild left over, the rarest beasts with talons sharp or long teeth beared in the faraway places we may never go. 

 

Joy is the wayward weed in the uptown sidewalk seam, the one I choose to call wildflower, that they call weed, because it has the audacity not to be planted or to succumb, to control to be proudly green. 

 

Joy is at the end of every cycle completed to a bruised dimming sky when the night comes again, when fortune can be measured by breaths taken without trying. 

 

Joy is the frog’s calling. 

 

Joy is the close call that wasn’t close enough.

 

Joy is a heart still beating even though what could have been wasn’t. 

 

Joy is that fleeting thing we grab sometimes that slides from possession stolen and bits and pieces between yawning cracks of despair, those drops of salt water rivering in the creases of an upturned smile. 

 

Joy is the necessity never to be owned. 

 

Joy is what we must have laying by. Joy is what we must keep hoarded up, ever ready to apply. 

 

Joy is the gift, what we deserve without asking, or demands when no one else really cares. 

 

Joy is the reward, the pay we have earned, the day off just because we can.

 

Joy is the kiss of that beloved one. 

 

Joy is that a verdict delivered by the upstanding 12 for the dead nine. 

 

Joy is the everything. Joy is sometimes the nothing. Joy is the simple, joy is the complex.  Joy is silly, joy is serious. Joy is the trivial, the tiny. Joy is enormous. 

 

Joy is the murmuration, it is our stillness. 

 

Joy is the inexplicable coincidence. Joy is what was meant to be, maybe the absurd. Occasionally joy is some genius. To my people, those fallen on hard times, pierced by injustice, torn ascender by hate. Know within the marrow bone of your soul that joy is the divine sublime in you. 

 

Joy is for all the dangers, all the toil, every last one of the snares already overcome and hopes yet to be born. What I mean to say is that joy is a song.

 

[singing]

 

This joy I have, the world didn’t give it to me. 

Joy I have, the world didn’t give it to me.

The joy I have, the world didn’t give it to me.

I say, the world didn’t give it, 

The world can’t take it away.

 

[singing ends]

 

You see y’all? Joy is that leaky bucket that lets me sometimes carry half a song. But what I intend for us, our claim, that joy is the justice we must give ourselves.

 

This last piece that I want to share, much shorter. 

 

[applause and cheers]

 

Thank you, thank you. Thank you, thank you.

 

And as a matter of attribution, I want you to understand when I say Talk-ish Touch, every conversation that I’ve had, pulling myself out of my introvert’s hole, being rescued by Sumanth Prabhaker, my good friend, and Danté, those approaching me and meeting total strangers who suddenly we are completing one another’s sentences. I hope you hear yourselves in these words. 

 

And now a word on economics. 

 

Love is barter—love is bits of affection traded for pieces of adoration.

 

Love is desire doled out on the whippoorwill’s summer wanting. Love
is our certain craving for the meadowlark’s ringing song—it is our longing
for spring’s greening from our sun-starved spirits down to our
bare-toed roots. We seek the winding path and wander until
we find the sweet spots—blackwater cypress swamp, tallgrass
prairie sweep, redwoods reaching to heaven—that place where moonlight glancing off of tide-
slicked stones has made us weep.

 

We summon the wild soul and a shadow-dwelling wood thrush
heaps it on us in self-harmonizing sonata—We revel in wild-
flowers bloom—we marvel in the migratory sojourns of birds
dodging falling stars. Sink yourselves then deep into the dancing
of pollen-drunk bees. Find hope in the canopies of
the tallest trees. Wind and water—storm and surf—these can
move us to better ends. In them is the true turn on. The honey
sweet seduction. Nature asks only that we notice—a sunrise
here—a sunset there. The surge, that overwhelming inex-
plicable thing in a swallow’s joyous flight or the dawning of
new light, those moments that meld heart and head into sensual self in that
moment of true seeing—that is love.

Thank you.

[applause]