{"id":573891412,"date":"2019-08-08T22:52:29","date_gmt":"2019-08-09T02:52:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573891412"},"modified":"2019-08-12T16:28:02","modified_gmt":"2019-08-12T20:28:02","slug":"that-only-make-me-lay-it-down-more-careful-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2019\/08\/08\/that-only-make-me-lay-it-down-more-careful-like\/","title":{"rendered":"‘that only make me lay it down more careful-like’"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a certain joy to getting home in time, leaving again right away and somehow that being nine minutes late and yet still getting a good shot to extended parking, an easy parking place, a timely shuttle to the airport, a pleasant conversation with two people going on a cruise and a quick bite to eat, before a relatively decent TSA experience and then finding yourself at the gate before your plane arrives. <\/p>\n

There’s a certain joy to hearing a gate agent who has no optimism at all. “This flight hasn’t been canceled yet.” There’s a certain resigned humor to hearing of a delay, knowing there’s no plane at the end of that jetway, or weather between here and that plane and knowing this is going on for a while, a run-on sentence of gate announcements that continue to portend this flight will be boarding in 15 minutes, now 45, and it isn’t canceled yet, until it is.<\/p>\n

But who cares about that? There’s always a flight tomorrow. We’re booked on it. Because we were nine minutes leaving the house, but still had a good trip up to the airport, we could linger over food in the concourse. And because I got a refill at Chick-fil-A, by the time I got down the terminal all of the seats at the gate were taken. So we sat at an empty gate across the way, on the other side the slidewalk, but next to this cool installation: <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/center><\/p>\n

Mari Evans wrote, in about 1992, Celebration. She was a writer, a teacher, a television producer. And the words she could write, the feelings she could bring out of you … She taught African American Literature at Indiana, and she could do some stuff with just an incomplete phrase that could pull you this way and that. It’s no wonder she taught people how to use the language, for she was a masterful user of it, indeed.<\/p>\n

The poem Celebration was about people who were flawed and perfect and who had been through some stuff:<\/p>\n

I will bring you a whole person
\nand you will bring me a whole person
\nand we will have us twice as much of love and everything<\/p>\n

I be bringing a whole heart
\nand while it do have nicks and
\ndents and scars,
\nthat only make me lay it down
\nmore careful-like
\nAn; you be bringing a whole heart
\na little chipped and rusty an’
\nsometime skip a beat but
\nstill an’ all you bringing polish too
\nand look like you intend
\nto make it shine<\/p>\n

And we be bringing, each of us
\nthe music of ourselves to wrap
\nthe other in<\/p>\n

Forgiving clarities
\nSoft as a choir’s last
\nlingering note our
\npersonal blend<\/p>\n

I will be bringing you someone whole
\nand you will be bringing me someone whole
\nand we be twice as strong and we be twice as true
\nand we will have twice as much of love
\nand everything<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I discovered her because of this mural in Indianapolis:<\/p>\n