"You are who I love," writes Aracelis Girmay, big-hearted poet.
You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart
You, in the park, feeding the pigeons You cheering for the bees
You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats
You protecting the river You are who I love delivering babies, nursing the sick
I have been carrying this poem around, printed and tucked into my notebook, for a year. As if osmosis is a thing for words on paper, spontaneous diffusion of ideas by mere contact. Yet, the changing of the year and a new notebook brings me face to face again with this love, this fierce defiance of cynicism and fear.
You are who I love, changing policies, standing in line for water, stocking the food pantries, making a meal
You are who I love, writing letters, calling the senators, you who, with the seconds of your body (with your time here), arrive on buses, on trains, in cars, by foot to stand in the January streets against the cool and brutal offices, saying: YOUR CRUELTY DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME
You are who I love, you struggling to see
You struggling to love or find a question
It occurs to me that people don’t generally write poems about loving the attractive, loving the resource-rich, loving those for whom ease is guaranteed. If you have that kind of privilege you don’t get a poem because you don’t need a poem—at least not this kind of poem.
The radical act is to love the one who has nothing to offer you—no material reward, no social cachet, maybe not even a return of kind regard. The radical act is to love the one living their life in an honesty and vulnerability that may be inconvenient and messy and uncomfortable.
You who did and did not survive You who cleaned the kitchens You who built the railroad tracks and roads You who replanted the trees, listening to the work of squirrels and birds, you are who I love You whose blood was taken, whose hands and lives were taken, with or without your saying Yes, I mean to give. You are who I love.
I’m reminded of Dr. King’s Mountaintop speech where he breaks down the parable of the Good Samaritan. An outcast man risks his safety and security to assist an injured man along a road, after two other men of high rank passed by. King says the Samaritan “decided not to be compassionate by proxy.” Instead of asking, “If I stop and help this man, what will happen to me?”, the Samaritan reversed it and asked, “If I do not stop and help this man, what will happen to him?”
You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting, in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love You are who I love You and you and you are who
Girmay is offering that grace to all of us and mostly to those of us who maybe need a radical act to show us a better way in this world. She is suggesting, demonstrating, not only that everyone deserves love, but that we can be the one—the radical one—who offers it.
Read her entire poem here.
art by Heiko Schultze, from the author's collection