Life Is Fine

Life Is Fine

...may be a barefaced lie.

I just read a poem
written by a young man
living at a Harlem YMCA
while studying English.

He's come from the South,
but has traveled even further,
transcending time and place
to tell me his story.

It's not too unusual
or even too improbable,
but it's a black man's story
written nearly a century ago.

And it's not a story
that everyone knows,
unless they understand it
from personal experience.

And it's not a tale
we all want to hear,
as it asks us to grapple
with our own histories,
and to perhaps consider
how our happy ignorance
makes us utterly complicit
in the face of great evil.

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I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn't
So I jumped in and sank.

I came up once and hollered!
I came up twice and cried!
If that water hadn't a-been so cold
I might've sunk and died...

~ Langston Hughes
(from his poem "Life Is Fine")

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