Month: February 2025

Remembering Pauli Murray’s Dark Testament

On By MaryIn poetry, winterLeave a comment

Here we are mid-winter, ensconced in ice and snow and soul chilling cold. It is tomato soup and grilled cheese time. It is hearty beef stew time. It is time to hibernate and hope for spring and the freedom that comes with warmth and the flowing of new life.

Oh, it is all of that, and then I turn on the news, and I’m caught up in the darkness. And then I remembered Pauli Murray’s poem Dark Testament, and its meditations on hope and freedom. Here’s a sample:

Dark Testament. Pauli Murray.

In memory of Stephen Vincent Benét.

Freedom is a dream

Haunting as amber wine

Or worlds remembered out of time.

Not Eden’s gate, but freedom

Lures us down a trail of skulls

Where men forever crush the dreamers—

Never the dream.

VERSE 8

Hope is a crushed stalk

Between clenched fingers

Hope is a bird’s wing

Broken by a stone.

Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty —

A word whispered with the wind,

A dream of forty acres and a mule,

A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,

A name and place for one’s children

And children’s children at last . . .

Hope is a song in a weary throat.

Give me a song of hope

And a world where I can sing it.

Give me a song of faith

And a people to believe in it.

Give me a song of kindliness

And a country where I can live it.

Give me a song of hope and love

And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.

Now, by all means, head over to your local independently owned bookstore and find a copy of Pauli Murray’s book: Dark Testament: and Other Poems.

I first came to know Pauli Murray through her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt. In an essay published in 1952, Mrs. Roosevelt described Pauli Murray as, “One of my finest young friends is a charming woman lawyer . . . who has been quite a firebrand at times, but of whom I am very fond.” The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice describes her as:

A twentieth-century human rights activist, legal scholar, feminist, poet, author, Episcopal priest, labor organizer, multiracial Black, LGBTQ+ person from Durham, NC, who lived one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century. S/he was the first Black person to earn a JSD (Doctor of the Science of Law) degree from Yale Law School, a founder of the National Organization for Women and the first Black person perceived as a woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. 

If you want to know more about her life and her friendship with Mrs. Roosevelt, I highly recommend The Firebrand and the First Lady, by Patricia Bell-Scott.

thanks for most this amazing day

On By MaryIn Awe, Gratitude, poetryLeave a comment

Lately I’ve noticed that I seem to be much more adept at remembering my missteps and mistakes, letting those define me, rather than honoring my growth and successes. How is it that the negative carries so much weight in my mind, in our world? For sure, these days there is a lot to be worried about: fires, storms, and floods; conflicts, wars, hostages; threats, lies, and chaos. But obsessing endlessly about all of that does little to nurture the soul. And if we would continue the struggle for wisdom, mercy, and justice, sometimes we need to pause and bathe ourselves in the nurturing waters of gratitude.  So, I am renewing my commitment to gratitude and giving thanks. Here’s is one of my favorite poems that eloquently sings a resonant thank you . . .

mary

I thank You God for most this amazing day

e.e. cummings

I thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(I who have died am alive again today,

And this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth

Day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay

Great happening illimitable earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any—lifted from the no

of all nothing—human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

This poem was originally published in Xaipe1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), reissued in 2004 by Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Company. Reprinted here by permission of the publisher. Copyright expires 2045.