Dirt Heart Witch
Words are hard. I am right now hopeful and happy to be gathering my Family together for meetings/food/games and also furiously angry at the unholy bullshit in the world. I was trying to write something intelligent and inspiring about both of these things, but then Matthew found this poem by his Baba and I realized that this pretty much sums it up. This was written sometime between 1964 and 1969.
EVERY CHILD by Alexander T. Coyle
If God once came to earthly men,
A white child,
A Jewish baby,
In Bethlehem,
In 5 or 8 B.C.,
Could not God come again,
A yellow child,
A Chinese baby –
Even a Red Chinese baby –
In Hong Kong
In 1964 A.D.?
Or a brown Buddhist baby in Saigon
Or a black non-violent baby in Birmingham?
And what if the baby has for parents rich Roman Catholics?
Or poor, ignorant Holy Rollers?
And what if the baby is a blonde little blue-eyed girl,
Or a blind little boy –
Or club-footed – or retarded?
Or what if he is beaten dead by drunken parents,
Or starved slowly by economic conditions,
Or condemned to superstition by blind tradition,
Or to ignorance by segregation?
How can we fail to see
That God might be –
Oh, that God has to be –
In any baby –
No, in every baby;
And treat each child perhaps
As though he were a Christ
And peer into his eyes for truth
And examine his hand for right
And his little chuckle for freedom
And stand by in awe
As we watch him grow
And learn
And love
And bring some glint of God –
Or blinding light of heaven –
Into the world?
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