Spring is here.
Take a minute to listen to Dominic West read W.B. Yeats’ 1919 poem “The Second Coming”:
The gyre widens. More is emerging than the center can hold, and the self-appointed guardians of civilization are quaking.
William Butler Yeats was born in the mid-1860s, an age whose social and spiritual upendings rival those I’ve seen in my lifetime.1 Over the following few years, Yeats and his family bounced between England and Ireland, and he explored 18th C English literature as he grew into his own voice.
I read those same writers while I was in college. That was how I came across two sonnets titled “Ozymandias,” one by Percy Bysshe Shelley and the other by Horace Smith. Shelley and Smith—not just contemporaries but also friends—were inspired by the Egyptian warrior king Ramesses II. Their poems captured me immediately.
Shelley’s “Ozymandias” paints a vivid tableau: A shattered statue lies half buried in sand. Part of the statue’s inscription is still visible but the desert reclaims the rest with every gust of wind. Smith’s sonnet sketches the same scene, and he goes a little further by linking ancient worlds to worlds not yet made. He wonders what the future might think of his present, how the wilderness might one day reclaim London, and how time itself will testify of his generation.
As I re-read these poems, Yeats’ sphinx “slouching towards Bethlehem” for yet another civilizational rupture, I think of Colossus, the ancient Greek wonder raised to honor the sun god Helios three hundred years before Jesus of Nazareth. The timeline passes before me with a montage: bloody victories of generals, kings, and military algorithms. Conquerers and colonizers ride across old continents and new; with enough millennia past, their steeds become cast iron guards for city parks and museums.
In the poets’ imagination, and mine, the era of Ozymandias is already lost to time. His legacy is already rubble before any of these poems are written. The gyre of change turns and turns at dizzying pace, and even those of us who want a world of more freedom, agency, dignity, and care sometimes have to catch our breath.
It’s destabilizing when the ground literally quakes beneath your feet.
Change is unmooring. Its shock waves are unpredictable.
But the gods and great men are already dust.
Babylon is fallen.
Resilience in a world of sand
My grandparents were rural Jamaicans born during the early years of World War I, which began in Europe the same decade Yeats wrote “The Second Coming.” It and the wars to follow consumed young men and their families all over the world. Grandpa picked up jobs drafted Americans left behind—farm work in OH, construction in the UK, religious book sales in Jamaica—anything that would reliably feed and house a family of twelve.
Sands shifted. Time passed. Towers fell.
Grandma lived until her mind gave out; Grandpa, until his body did. I’ve been thinking about the conditions and choices that shaped them both… patterns they passed down that I find myself weaving, unpicking, and weaving again… worlds I’m free to imagine now that they couldn’t fully perceive in their lifetimes.
Yet something connects us all. My people have been migratory islanders for as many generations back as mitochondrial DNA goes. Thousands of years ago, they migrated from the horn of Africa across the Sahel’s semi-arid plains and plateaus to the western gulf coast and the islands there. They tracked winds and trade routes; they nudged burden beasts back and forth.
All of them saw empires rise and fall. Some of them saw empires fall on them. And some of them survived the shifting sands.
Enough of them outlasted catastrophe after catastrophe, genocide and Maafa—enough that the line persisted.
Last decade this spring, I was editing my grandfather’s biography. Earlier that year Mum had asked Grandpa about his guiding philosophy, and he responded with a short verse:
“Do what you can - Be what you are. Shine like a glow worm - If you cannot, be a star.” And then he said “I’m still shining!”
When I searched for the original text he’d quoted, I sourced it back to 1892, twenty years before Yeats’ center stopped holding. And here’s how the Southwestern Journal of Education printed the verse:
Do what you can, be what you are;
Shine like a glow-worm, if you cannot be a star;
Work like a pulley, if you cannot be a crane;
Be a wheel greaser, if you cannot drive a train;
Be the pliant oar, if you cannot be the sailor;
Be the little needle, if you cannot be the tailor;
Be the cleaning broom, if you cannot be the sweeper;
Be the sharpened stick, if you cannot be the reaper.
Can you see the difference a comma makes? The original poem encourages moderated expectations: if you can't achieve your dream, cut it back. Accept something smaller.
But the poem Grandpa made his own starts on the earth and ends in space. He took a verse about accepting one’s lot in a world of dust and turned it into a self-empowered mantra about reaching higher.
I’ve been pondering this story for a decade and still don’t understand exactly where this energy came from.
I’m just glad my elders passed it down.
Perspectives from the Wild, Wild World
About those military algorithms: +972 Magazine, reports on Lavender, the algorithm that the Israeli army has been using to target humans across Gaza and the West Bank. Lavender supplements an algorithm that targets buildings and which the army profanely named The Gospel. (April 2024)
On remembering transAtlantic enslavement and enslaved people’s uprisings: At The Guardian, scholar and author Vincent Brown reflects on working with the Jamaican government to commemorate Takyi’s Rebellion, an 18th Century milestone in the unfolding freedom of enslaved peoples in the Americas (March 2024).
Boeing’s last 20 years are a cautionary tale in abandoning engineering, marketing, and consumer trust—worst Neopolitan ice cream recipe ever. NPR charts the kind of year Boeing’s team is having, while The Atlantic explains exactly what happened after the company moved its admin team away from where the planes are actually made (archived link).
And two updates on World Central Kitchen, which I supported and referred to you in early October: one from The Nation, and the second from a Palestinian former WCK employee in Mondoweiss (April 2024).
Network opportunities
My friend Fred Johnson is hosting a 1hr class on sound healing on Saturday, April 20, at 2pm ET. While Fred’s rooted in African and Sufi Muslim traditions, this class is open to all.
The April class sets up a deeper 7-week course (May 9-June 20) on the voice, ancestral wisdom, and possibility. Both experiences will be delightful. Learn more at The Shift Network.Marcia Lee and Valarie Brown lead another 2-session online retreat at the Center for Courage and Renewal this May and June. Still We Heal centers rest for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) spiritual leaders and activists; if you know someone who needs that space, send them over.
Finally: How to use a platform
“Be careful with each other so you can be dangerous together.”
Dr. Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice: How to Grow the World We Want,2 recently received an honorary degree from her alma mater, the storied Spelman College. Her acceptance speech was gorgeous, pointed, clear: a model of truth-telling, character, and invitation.
Dr. Benjamin has shared a captioned version of her full remarks on Dropbox, and her agency just posted it to YouTube today.
Listen to it (14:53). Save it.
And explore what might change about your life if you were to live by her counsel.
Until next time,
Keisha
A recent Vanity Fair essay includes this quote from Mad Men’s creator Matthew Weiner: “So much political and cultural tumult happened in 1968 ‘that when you look at the calendar, you cannot even believe that happened all at once. You feel the crushing of idealism, you feel civilization itself on the precipice.’”
This Bookshop link is an affiliate link. Bookshop.org distributes books from independent booksellers and is an alternative to the monster online seller of books, sundries, surveillance systems, digital media, and concierge doctors that has spent the last 30 years buying up as many of its competitors as will bow the knee. Use Bookshop.