As I reflect on your mostly pale faces before me and my mission this weekend it’s for more tolerance--not judging folks by their skin color, their manner of speech, their clothing or appearance. I’ll try to do a better job of realizing they’re all one of us, and that, as our DNA tells me, we’re all mutts. Who knows the next African American or Afghani I meet may become another astrophysicist.
from The Black Maria
The Skyview apartments
circa 1973, a boy is
kneeling on the rooftop, a boy who
(it is important
to mention here his skin
is brown) prepares his telescope,
the weights & rods,
to better see the moon. His neighbor
(it is important to mention here
that she is white) calls the police
because she suspects the brown boy
of something, she does not know
what at first, then turns,
with her looking,
his telescope into a gun,
his duffel into a bag of objects
thieved from the neighbors’ houses
(maybe even hers) & the police
(it is important to mention
that statistically they
are also white) arrive to find
the boy who has been turned, by now,
into “the suspect,” on the roof
with a long, black lens, which is,
in the neighbor’s mind, a weapon &
depending on who you are, reading this,
you know that the boy is in grave danger,
& you might have known
somewhere quiet in your gut,
you might have worried for him
in the white space between lines 5 & 6,
or maybe even earlier, & you might be holding
your breath for him right now
because you know this story,
it’s a true story, though,
miraculously, in this version
of the story, anyway,
the boy on the roof of the Skyview lives
to tell the police that he is studying
the night & moon & lives
long enough to offer them (the cops) a view
through his telescope’s long, black eye, which,
if I am spelling it out anyway,
is the instrument he borrowed
& the beautiful “trouble” he went through
lugging it up to the roof
to better see the leopard body of
space speckled with stars & the moon far off,
much farther than (since I am spelling The Thing
out) the distance between
the white neighbor who cannot see the boy
who is her neighbor, who,
in fact, is much nearer
to her than to the moon, the boy who
wants to understand the large
& gloriously un-human mysteries of
the galaxy, the boy who, despite “America,”
has not been killed by the murderous jury of
his neighbor’s imagination & wound. This poem
wants only the moon in its hair & the boy on the roof.
This boy on the roof of this poem
with a moon in his heart.
Thanks to...
So, here’s a selection from a poem written by Aracelis Girmay, a black poet from Santa Ana, which is about as far from where Dr. Tyson grew up in New York City as you can get in these United States, but not as far as the new telescope soaring above us. She is imagining, imaging, an actual incident from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s boyhood, not as a scientist would but as a poet.
At the helm of Sespe Creek Collective since 2013, Chelsea has lobbied local and state legislators for safe access to cannabis for nearly a decade. Sespe Creek was the first licensed cannabis dispensary to open in Ventura County, on the one-year anniversary after the delivery service was raided and all inventory seized by local law enforcement in November 2016. The unprecedented return of that inventory five years later was covered in .png)
