I am not the best person to write about this. I have little to no formal training; I do not read poetry as regularly as I would like, and certainly not enough to write about its reading.
I have a friend who always asks people for new found wisdom every birthday. I jotted this down when I turned thirty.
I recall my early childhood often. The slant of light through a half-open curtain; the soft low of a cow heard while driving by a pasture; a description of country roads in a Chekhov story will each carry my mind to those sultry summer evenings spent waiting at the window of my grandparents' country home for the sun to fall and the cows to return from grazing.
I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs.
While I am clearly not qualified to speak on race, neither is Robin DiAngelo. I wrote this after reading her book because I think that of all the takes on how to alleviate racism, the one that centers around “shaming white people for being white”, and refuses systemic reform is the one least likely to accomplish anything. If anything, this approach turns real problems into social capital for progressive well-off white people that can be used to virtue signal allyship.