Dreaming Big this Black History Month

Langston Hughes’s poem “The Dream Keeper” got the Pongo team thinking about the big dreams and hopes of Black youth poets now and through the ages. Inspired, Poetry Mentors at CFJC (King County Juvenile Detention), led a group exercise using 2 refrains from this poem (Bring me all your…So I can…) to structure a co-created poem:

THINGS WE CAN TAKE

by CFJC Youth Residents & Adult Poetry Mentors

Bring me all your happiness, anger and tears
Bring me your emotions—your tattered
rain-soaked worries, your cold, cramping fears
Bring me all your joy, pain, and wisdom
Bring me your hates—your skin crawling
chalkboard-scratching dislikes
Bring me your broken dreams

So that I can understand your life
and I will relate on your faults
So you are not alone in your world of hatred and greed
So that I can understand your pain
and understand the weight of who you are
I will hold your emotions—not as who you are,
not even as the many-facetted diamond of who you are,
but I will hold them as feathers—light leavings
of flight that I blow away
with a kiss
goodbye

A special thank you to Tamara Keefe at Seattle Parks Department for sparking this idea through her column in the Parks’ February Newsletter, 2021.