FARAI CHIDEYA, host:
On this day of thanks, three of our regular poets offer a few words about what this time means to them and what they're thankful for this year.
Ms. FREDA DENIS-COOPER: My name is Freda Denis-Cooper and this my poem "Children of the Stream."
(Reciting) Love, like a stream flowing down, fills me with the triumph of my ancestors and leads me like a child into the hope of God's promise. Obediently I take hold of hands that protect and guide me through. Honor thy father and mother. I celebrate the richness of heritage, the miracle of today and the awe of tomorrow. Dance with me, through the harvest of this season. Sing a bold and joyful song. Worship in spirit and in truth. We are the blessed children of the stream, children of the most high God, immersed in his ever-flowing spirit of love.
Ms. SHARAN STRANGE: My name is Sharan Strange and this is my poem "Thankful."
(Reciting) Thankful for the day even when I barely recognize it, like the balmy winter morning as leaves, sensing my audience, articulate a dance, sashaying to the breeze's ardor and I, too, feel its fingering, notes played on me, sensuous sun easing me. And the news is my nephew is alive, having survived Iraq, and now a father. Thankful for the day, though I'm faced to fathom it, as earth and ocean cough and the spasms sweep over us, leaving no fathers, mothers, children in its wake, but a swelling grief, a wound our collective compassion must cauterize, and we have not forgotten how to feel and cry out for justice and craft our words and move our hands to its shape. Thankful for the day when the unsaid looms greater than what is, for the day, every day, even as we are surrounded by mystery and rude existence and struggle against fear and anger. And I remember that there is a clearing in me, a space made holy by my grandmother's love, by my ancestors' survival, holy and nakedly joyful, breathing each day new life.
Mr. DASAN AHANU: My name is Dasan Ahanu and this is my Thanksgiving Day poem.
(Reciting) Ask me about a Thursday in November and I can speak volumes about love, sprinkled in pots and pie dishes and served warm like strong family values, to see matriarchs give us a history lesson in what you give thanks for. My fight fed by cooking rich in freedom so I eat it like escape, an Underground Railroad sustenance into my belly, until I'm too full to be held down anymore. I'm thankful that the prayer we say is in a circle of trust, hands held tight because the day we claim as ours was a day where fingers were crossed and promises broken and hands that prayed shook hands that invoked spirits with ill intentions. This is a day of reckoning and I am thankful for the dialogue that I have, with little cousins who are the future we need, with elders who held the fight we search for, with friends that make movements. Community is indigenous here and we work hard not to let anything eliminate that and heed the model we've seen. I am thankful for the compassion that provides dinners to shelters, Katrina and Rita survivors, group homes and community centers. I am thankful for the tribes that still exist, for the understanding that still exists, for my family's day of peace that still exists.
CHIDEYA: Poet and spoken-word artist Dasan Ahanu teaches at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Sharan Strange teaches creative writing at Spelman College in Atlanta. Her collection of poems is titled "Ash." And Freda Denis-Cooper has a collection of poems titled "Stones Unturned: The Soul Poetic."
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