I treasure people (living and dead) whose loving witness is so intensely specific that they’re almost completely useless for anyone’s marketing scheme. Poetry, I’m about ready to conclude, memorializes specificity. I think prophecy does too.
Will Campbell was one of those people. He goes before us. Have you heard of him?
Here’s the kind of thing he said:
Once you start saying, ‘God made this country great,’ then you can justify anything under the sun, including blowing people’s sweetbreads right through their earholes.
I think about him most days. I hear his voice in my head asking, “What do you want to see happen here?”
And here’s Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Meaning.” The Reverend James Lawson shared it when he eulogized Will years ago and then again more recently when he eulogized Congressman John Lewis.
Cool poem