If you can't fly, then run

And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
~Naomi Shihab Nye

Happy Poetry Friday! Are you ready for National Poetry Month? I'm not, but I hope to get my act together soon. I'll be away next Friday but I'll schedule something. Today, we have a poem that is based on a true story about children striving to become Olympians.

The Ditch Kids of the Maui Sugar Company
by Derek Otsuji

Barred from swimming pools the hot summer long
but loving the delicious cold on our skins,
we dove in ditches dug to irrigate
the same fields where our fathers slogged, under
the supervising eye of a white sun winking
on the blades of their machetes. Of course
there were barbed fences to keep us from ditches,
just as there were codes that banned us from pools
sealed behind an elite sports club’s gleaming
walls, a taboo, like a shiny thing, asking
to be smashed.
Released from sluice gates,
the sloshing water, brown as our arms,
ran down the channels, as we dipped and stroked,
like salmon driven upstream, the russeting
current sliding off flexed shoulder blades
in silted robes as we reached speeds that broke
all barriers and in our homegrown upstart way,
always the outside chance, the dark horse’s surge,
we sugar ditch kids, turning laps like verses
of an olympian ode, plowed that narrow lane
to victory and were crowned aquatic kings.

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* The title of the post comes from a quote from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” I thought that was appropriate since the "ditch kids" found a way to keep swimming, and we all need to figure out our own ways to move forward.

* Fighting Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Resistance Ordinary people have more power than they know.

* National Bail Fund Network

* Poetry as a path to recovery for children in Ukraine



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Marcie Flinchum Atkins has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Marcie!