"Like the Faultlines that Pave the Palms of Your Hands"

"When your hands go out,
love, toward mine,
what do they bring me flying?
Why did they stop
at my mouth, suddenly,
why do I recognize them
as if then, before,
I had touched them,
as if before they existed
they had passed over
my forehead, my waist?

This first stanza from poet Pablo Neruda's poem "Your Hands" was the starting place for our recent discussion about the meaning of beauty during A.B.L.E.'s Love Supreme program. The questions that students were asked to consider: What makes a person, place or thing "beautiful"? What part of ourselves do we find beautiful?

To help ease any possible tension about discussing the topic, all the participants formed a circle and placed their hands palms up and observed what they saw. They then wrote down what they liked and disliked about their hands. Next, they each traced and cut out an outline of their hands, noting what they liked on their left palm and what they disliked on their right palm. Finally, they worked with a partner and photographed their hands.

The reactions to this exercise revealed much about how adolescents think and feel about concepts of beauty. Listening to their views I was reminded of the lines from Nick Laird's poem "On Beauty:"

They are the damed
and so their sadness is perfect,
delicate as an egg placed in your palm.
Hard, it is decorated with their face.

Like the fault lines that pave the palms of our hands, what the students learned about beauty is that it can take many paths.

World AIDS Day

When A.B.L.E. gathered today to begin our observation of World AIDS Day, it hit me that all of my students were born in what I would call the "post-pandemic" era. This is the time since the global health crisis stop being an 'incurable plague" in the minds of many. The A.B.L.E. students were born in a moment that allows them to transcend the public debate about whether or not the pandemic had been handed down as punishment for the moral decay of Western society. For most of them HIV/AIDS is a chronic disease that long since stop being an overt symbol of homophobic hysteria.

Yet, 17 years after I watched in stunned silence at the t.v. monitors in JFK airport as Magic Johnson announced (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSfy4AhDDnw) to the world that he had "acquired the AIDS virus," I wondered if they fully realize how much the HIV/AIDS crisis was still profoundly (re)shaping the lives of African Americans in Washington, D.C.