Thank you Kayelle for your response. Yes. This is a universal parental experience. The other side of that being the blessing it is to love someone so very much that their peril is your peril, their salvation, your salvation. I pray for those terrified parents who, like George Floyd’s mother and too many others, live through stories that end in tragedy and devastation rather than salvation. Blessings. Alice

Dear Bob. I apologize deeply for my delay in responding. I fell into a bit of a wallow for a while, but now I am back. One of the reasons for that wallow is the situation you address so beautifully, so movingly in your poem. What should be self-evident, and should have been self-evident always, still remains as it too long has been, in need of reiterating over and over again. Your poem expresses, among many things, the frustration so many people of good will feel. Justice delayed is justice denied, and justice has been denied for way too long. I pray that will change. Meanwhile, I salute your daughter and her husband and you. Thank you for your service to the cause of human decency. Blessings. Alice

June 3, 2020

My daughter, Yaara, woke up and thought
this day calls me, a white woman,
to show, not talk.
This day calls me to demonstrate
Black lives are equal to white lives.
To demonstrate; so during my lifetime,
it won’t be necessary to say Black lives matter.
It will be self-evident, like gravity.

On that morning in downtown Seattle,
she and her husband marched in protest.
They got to the front of the crowd
where a young Black man stood and
Shouted! Shouted! Shouted! Shouted!
She flashed on a hundred scenarios,
and then demonstrated…not only
courage, but coexistence.
Quick, we’ve got to stand next to him
so he won’t get hurt!
They did and he wasn’t.

The day after she told me her story,
I read that a mother grouse, surrounded
by hunters, will fly haltingly away.
Pretend to be wounded,
drawing their fire while her chicks escape.
I think there’s something innate in living beings
that matters far more than our differences.
That matters.