Words That Burn the Center of the Sun

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Monday – Martin Luther King Day

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks celebrates the man we honor today. Her describing race hatred as a volcano strikes me as only too accurate, and although that hatred resulted in his death, the image of his ashes—like a volcano’s—being spread around the world is an effective reversal. Instead of destroying his message, the assassination amplified it.

And as his words of faith and power have spread, they have anointed the barricades of the resistance movement. “So it shall be done,” Brooks says confidently at the poem’s end.

In contrast to the image of volcanic hate, Brooks gives us an even more powerful and transcendent fire—that of the justice—which counteracts the earth-bound emotions. This fire reaches “the thousands and the hundred thousands.”

Brooks’s clash of visions takes me back to the rightwing American history teacher I had in 1968, when I was a junior at the Sewanee Military Academy. The day after King was killed, Jim Miller came to class and told us, “He lived by the sword and he died by the sword.” Miller was one within whom the volcanic hatred burned.

King’s genius was to counter the sword of white violence by a message of love and peace. We’re far from quenching the volcanic flames of racism—perhaps we never will—but King’s solar vision of justice has taken us far further than I ever thought possible when I was growing up in the segregated south.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
By Gwendolyn Brooks

A man went forth with gifts.

He was a prose poem.
He was a tragic grace.
He was a warm music.

He tried to heal the vivid volcanoes.
His ashes are
     reading the world.

His Dream still wishes to anoint
     the barricades of faith and of control.

His word still burns the center of the sun
     above the thousands and the
     hundred thousands.

The word was Justice. It was spoken.

So it shall be spoken.
So it shall be done.