Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (Spanish Edition)

by Alice Walker

“talk to them about how that arrow many feel in their hearts is not theirs alone. Remind them it is worthwhile to train to learn how to remove it.”

Try to think bigger than you ever have or had courage enough to do: that blackness is not where whiteness wanders off to die: but that it is like the dark matter between stars and galaxies in the Universe that ultimately holds it all together.

a tall black man of a certain age strolls by blowing his saxophone. You smile and bow, he bows back, with his horn. His day is mellow. He’s in the sun. He has given mellowness and sun, free of charge, to you.

They will always be more beautiful than you the people you are killing. You think it is hatred that you feel but it is really envy. You imagine if you destroy them we will forget how tall they stood how level their gaze how straight their backs. How even the littlest ones

stood their little ground. Meanwhile you stand hunched as a cobbler in your absurd killer’s gear yelling like a crazy person, your face contorted dripping sweat from what would be with or without your lethal weapons a bullying brow and feral chin. Killing everyone but especially children, for sport. Looking cool in your own mind;

Brother, Sister, Children, you are not crazy to feel crazy here. Understanding this, may you realize a greater exterior calm and an unshakeable inner peace. We have lived within the soul of brutality from the beginning of our connections here.

We are the offspring of the ignorantly discarded: we conjure sunrise with our smiles and provoke music out of trash. Who can completely disappear such genius?