Last night I got to watch the national premiere of A Reckoning in Boston, a documentary film that began in the classroom of Boston’s Clemente Course. Woven through the film are texts students read for the class—Plato and James Baldwin and this tender love poem from Amiri Baraka. I didn’t know the poem before, and in the film we hear it read aloud as one of the film’s subjects, the wondrous Carl Chandler, travels by bus to visit his daughter in Philadelphia. I’m moved by its assertion that to know each other, to be connected to each other, is what defines our lives and makes them worth living.
“So for us to have been together, even
for this moment
profound like a leaf
blown in the wind”
