How y'all doing so far?
All right.
All right?
OK.
A couple of the poems I'm reading,
you all are really guinea pigging on them.
You're welcome.
[LAUGHTER]
And so this is a fairly very, very new.
As in like, a couple of weeks.
First draft.
"Roger, nine, pens a note for his adult self Winnipeg, 1977."
When I was about nine, my parents moved to Winnipeg
for a short while.
Great idea.
And you know, I was the only Black child in school there,
yo, straight from Trinidad.
It was a great time anyway.
[LAUGHTER]
"Roger, nine, pens a note for his adult
self Winnipeg, 1977," after Jimmy Santiago Baca.
They have taken your friends, so you will make new ones.
They have taken to calling you outside of your name,
so you will become a stone.
They have insulted your ability with books and words,
so you will cultivate aggression.
They have isolated you amidst a snarling sea of other,
so you will learn how to be alone.
They have attacked your body, so you have become a massive wind
chime of fists.
Who is to tell you this is not love?
Your mother's face, beautiful in its anguish,
as she drives the strange city to find you.
And you are not lost, just gone and alone for hours.
The way you have learned that what is foreign and savage
is also gorgeous.
The way in these short months, you
garnish from the harsh white winter
entire manuals for living out your destiny as a phenomenon
amidst unspeakable hostility.
You have learned to be faster than the other boys.
You have learned to lower your shoulder
and become a bull on the field.
You have learned a slow lidded callousness
in which to crawl before you bring blood to another body
is a surface.
You have learned the value of your open, exposed cage.
It's alone, alone, alone.
You will turn this into currency.
Everything in you is already right and humming.
You will need to remember this in the darkest of hours,
even with a blade gathering light in your hands,
you are beautiful.
You are beautiful.
[APPLAUSE]