To the Young Who Want to Die
By: Gwendolyn Brooks
Sit down. Inhale. Exhale. The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait: will wait a week: will wait through April. You do not have to die this certain day. Death will abide, will pamper your postponement. I assure you death will wait. Death has a lot of time. Death can attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; can meet you any moment. You need not die today. Stay here--through pout or pain or peskyness. Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow. Graves grow no green that you can use. Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.
Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, on June 7, 1917, and raised in Chicago. She was the author of more than twenty books of poetry… In 1968 she was named poet laureate for the state of Illinois.
In 1985, she was the first black woman appointed as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a post now known as Poet Laureate. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000. Source
I'm soooooo happy to see this. During my 37 years teaching high school, I intervened in 30 suicide cases from which only most actually didn't die.. There is a gigantic and-prevailing need for resources and substance in this area.I volunteered for crisis intervention after a girl killed herself in my first year teaching and by word-of-mouth, my reputation,spread. Because I was the only resource outside of counselors who for the most part, had NO plan or resource since many of the victims of societal ignorance about Gay anything but they had a lot of angst about Gayness and suicide.
There is optimism and there is powerful optimism like this. Beautifully constructed and to the point!