It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a holiday that far too often is seen as just a day off, a day when you don’t have to set the alarm, don’t have to rush off to work or school. Far too often it’s a day when folks post one of Dr. King’s most famous quotes, usually something about peace and love. It’s a day when too often, if people think about him at all, they think of him as a simple stand-in for goodness: we should all be peace-loving and forgiving and want unity, like Martin.

Well he was a peaceful man, and an incredible speaker, for sure. But neither the man nor his message was simple. If you haven’t read it, or shared it with your kids, Martin’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a great one to take a look at today. He writes:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

So what now? WHAT NOW? Especially today, in 2019, when this weekend, a long weekend honoring Dr. King has been bombarded with really hateful news? Nothing new, really. We keep working. We keep hoping. We don’t really have any other choice.

A dear friend of mine, a person who has devoted much of her life to climate work, sent me a poem she wrote. She didn’t mean to write it, she said. She meant to write something more organized, more concrete, more hopeful. But this is what came out. With her permission, I’ll share it here.

YOU, MY WEARY FRIEND


It was the reefs.
Kaleidoscopic dreamscapes 
of microscopic architects.
That blockbuster bio-circus
couldn’t last.
Tell me there’s another galaxy with coral.
 
It was the bears too, 
but don’t say. See, 
the apex beast in white, 
prowling the ice 
at the top of the world
(Milky Way, top that,
I’m waiting)
is a done deal,
and somehow cliché,
so let’s spare you
the mocking
of your broken child heart.
 
It was them, 
and the rest,
and then suddenly 
it was everything
that makes the world shimmer
and always made you know
why you came here 
from dark nothing.
You once walked 
through a world of wounds, 
but wounds are for healing.
You walk now
through a world of ghosts
half not yet knowing
they’re dead.
 
(Until the golden toad climbs
from the cloud forest muck 
to sing his springtime call
and no one 
in the wide universe 
answers. 
Then he knows.)
 
You felt it grow thin.
You started to grieve,
to rage,
and sometimes to panic,
looking for the door
or the way off this ride.
You felt it tear.
And suddenly 
it was too late.
Those fights, those long desperate fights
were over
and lost.
And then you didn’t feel it at all.
It was gone.
Sublimated from your soul
like vapor 
from the ancient ice. 
 
But listen:
It’s not that easy
to lose hope.
 
In English they say
“hope springs eternal”.
In Russian it’s 
“hope dies last”.
In this world
if you love anything
you hope.
You move.
You keep.
You don’t even get to decide.
 
You can watch the leaves
fall from your hope:
a bird here, a town there; 
a glacier, its river, their people.
Sometimes you learn of it
on your car radio 
in thick traffic
and you look around childlike 
for something to make sense.
Sometimes you know 
because you wait 
in season, in place,
and it never arrives.
And the leaves fall
til hope’s bare branches
are just beautiful bones against a gathering sky.
 
But don’t be fooled: 
It’s not that easy 
to kill hope.
 
However poorly you tend it, 
whoever writes its obit,
hope endures
in the dark ground
where the deep roots 
sense the scorched earth
and slowly 
in gentle silence 
but with all the unstoppable 
green-fuse force of life
dig 
deeper still.
However frail you think it, 
hope will not 
can not
quit. 
 
It relinquishes 
It shapeshifts 
It detaches 
from the object of its desire.
And hews only, but closely, 
to its driving spark.
And therein lies hope’s unstoppable power.
If you love
anything
you hope.
 
Not for this, not for that.
That was then.
Hope mutated
and evolved. 
It stopped saying:
I’m going to have to hope 
for the best.
Now it says: 
I’m going to have to fight 
like hell.
And that’s the bad news.
You’re going to have to fight like hell
without 
hope of winning.
There’s no “winning” 
anymore
when so much is lost.
There’s only 
what remains.
 
But look: 
it’s still beautiful.
I’ll fight for that.
 
Whatever you fought for,
whoever’s in your locket, 
the fight is now
for what’s left. 
That’s all.
And that’s everything.
And you, 
my weary friend,
will never stop.

So what does this have to do with Martin Luther King Day? What does our ailing planet have to do with civil rights and racial injustice? (A lot, actually, you can read about it here, here, and here!) The connection in my mind, the reason I’m sharing this, now, is because of hope. HOPE. We don’t get to give up, even if we want to. We don’t have that luxury, and as my friend writes, giving up hope is harder than it seems. So we hope, against the odds, that things are getting better, that we are inching closer to Martin’s Dream.

And no matter how weary, we never stop.