“We cannot create what we can't imagine.”
― Lucille Clifton
i’ve told this story before so permit me a bit of nostalgia to tell it again. in 2nd grade I wrote my first book. what came over me I don’t know. and somehow, in all of the accolades that i’ve celebrated in recent years, the memory of that book brings a warm smile to my face. I glued pieces of paper together in the form of a book and wrote on a topic that i was clearly an expert on…the desert. now how a Black chubby boy who never had even been on a plane thought deeply about the desert…I will never know. i suppose it was as audacious as my childhood fantasy of becoming a marine biologist…having never swam a day in my life…but I digress. i suppose this was the day the magic of the pen(cil) and the magic of my own imagination first came to life. what I couldn’t know then was that it would be some time, decades in fact, before I would ever consider myself a writer.
and then, I found the poem.
really found it.
a few years ago, poetry became the tool that I used to understand the world, God, myself…oh yes myself, and humanity. poetry helped to allow my mind the space to ponder, muse, and to imagine a different set of possibilities than the ones that we have constructed here on this planet. the planet that we continue to abuse. put simply, I became a poet in the midst of a world-wide pandemic. I wanted to start a new series on my substack giving honor to different poets and featuring my own work as well as the work of others. i will be doing a set of poetry collaborations with
and entitled “Traces of the Divine” and one with on “Imagination” There are one or two more I am trying to lock down. Anyways. i am more than excited. i’m ecstatic. To collaborate with beautiful poets and feature many others. In fact, get into this work by author Nikki Grimes: