“Your Best”: A Poem for Young People
Last week a cousin from Waycross, GA, Marian Solomon, surprised me with a message containing a blast from the past: a poem I wrote 25 or so years ago, “Your Best.” I read it at the bi-annual reunion that my paternal family has been doing since my grandfather Horace Thomas Sr. launched the gathering in the late 1970s.
I had in mind my daughter Kaya and other American children (especially those of African descent) who have a proud legacy to draw upon as they face life’s challenges. The poem also represented a point, in my own development, of transition from an Afrocentric frame of reference to a Blues Idiom emphasis. What’s common between then and now is an underlying cultural focus that begins in the particular and rises to the universal.
Parents are the first “leaders” children experience, so I invite you to tune in to this poem from a parent’s perspective.
YOUR BEST
Black child, your best is all I ask. Why?
Your best has given the world the gift of civilization —
Agriculture and writing, architecture, philosophy and math,
the arts and the sciences.
Your best has shown the world the way to travel from the animal
to the divine—if only the world had ears to hear and eyes to see.
Your best has shown the world the majestic, the humble, the noble,
the nurturing and the transcendent.
Your best gave Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth the will
and strength to fight against the evil of chattel slavery and for
your right to express the fullness of your humanity.
Your best gave Booker T. Washington the insight to develop
relationships with the power structure of his time for the purpose of
laying the institutional and industrial foundation for the growth and
development of his people, and for the good of the nation.
Your best impelled W.E.B. DuBois to develop the powers of his mind while
fighting for the liberation of the minds of his people
Your best ennobled Paul Robeson and gave him the wherewithal
to rise to athletic, artistic and intellectual heights and use his high,
renaissance man station to fight for peace and human dignity.
Martin and Malcolm tapped into “your best” to develop
their prodigious talents to set goals, take consistent action toward
achieving those objectives, and to have the willingness to change
course as their understanding grew.
Shirley Chisholm and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. utilized “your best”
to till the ground for the political attainment
of those too long left out of the government process.
Your best gave flight to the cosmopolitan scientific and cultural
excursions of astronauts Ronald McNair and Mae Jemison
while helping them maintain a grounded link to the black community.
Your best flowed through the creators of jazz—America’s classical art form—
and inspired them to display the highest ideals of American society in song and
through rhythm, harmony, melody, and the potency of group improvisation.
Your best gave the many great European-American Jazz artists
an art form though which to express their soul’s experiences and
texture and gave me a way to see the reality and integrity of their humanity.
For your best is the world’s best and shows how “yours” can become
“ours,” transcend “us” and “them” and thus realize the ultimate
we of humanity.