The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems)

by Alice Walker

Thorns may still prick our feet as we trudge hopefully along, but there will be moments of sheer incandescent joy.

Their blood has dried and become rose petals. What you feel brushing your cheek is not only your tears but these.

That to love another, any other, is to align oneself with eternal spring.

In this you are wrong. Killing the prophet will not make you right. Her blood sent flying in all directions by your assault will become innumerable seeds that sprout blades of bright grass announcing the truth like flags.

Hope that every failure is an arrow pointing toward enlightenment.

Hope to sin only in the service of waking up.

They tell so many lies I do not wonder that you have lost trust in human beings.

You are an expert, no matter how much they tell you

Truth itself is irrelevant if the lie is big enough.

Despair is the ground bounced back from:

It is compelling to watch the few still free of it. Who were never caged within the false bright light of “the set” nor ever pinned to the couch by TV.

want something else; a different system entirely. One not seen on this earth for thousands of years. If ever. Democratic Womanism. Notice how this word has “man” right in the middle of it? That’s one reason I like it. He is there, front and center. But he is surrounded.

Screams in gay

In any case, we will continue to endure, and detest, the systems currently in place, in which the condition of countless starving, tortured, enslaved and murdered children is seen as acceptable, unless we forthrightly begin to envision, and work for, something better: some way for humans to exist and thrive, without suffering the despair of every second of every day knowing our present predicament’s greatest cause is humanity’s fear of sharing equally with others, and its rapidly growing, partly because of this fear, self-hatred.

WOW