Today is Thanksgiving in the USA. I am wishing my American family and friends “happy thanksgiving”. I really love the idea of a Thanksgiving as it is focused on getting together, gratitude and remembrance, rather than gift giving (although don’t get me started on Black Friday in the UK!). Taking some time to acknowledge what we have and share that with others is a very heartfelt holiday. It can be hard to remember this at the moment when a lot of our focus is on what we cannot do or what we have lost. I did have a look for a poem specifically about gratitude and thankfulness but nothing seemed quite right. However, I had wanted to include something by Alice Walker in this series and found this poem which seems to build on that sense of gratitude for what we have and sharing that with others, as well as a call for action and acknowledging our place in change. I love the work of Alice Walker. I would like to re-read all her novels in 2021, one of my reading intentions!
The World We Want is Us
It moves my heart to see our awakened faces;
the look of “aha!”
shining, finally, in
so many
wide open eyes.
Yes, we are the 99%
all of us
refusing to forget
each other
no matter, in our hunger, what crumbs
are dropped by
the 1%.
The world we want is on the way; Arundhati
and now we
are
hearing her breathing.
That world we want is Us; united; already moving
into it.
2014, from The Quarry; A Social Justice Poetry Database