Guiding light
By Brandon Astor Jones
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR MAYA
How quickly your lovely presence has grown
Yes, into your own greatness you must aspire
Because the roots of your knowledge are known
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR MAYA
Maya, at 6.14 pm, on November 1, 1998, I wrote the lines above in my yearly celebration of your approaching birthday. Thirty-two minutes later I had also completed a poem for your father's birthday. I was not aware that he had died some months earlier. I am sorry for your/our loss.
It was only just recently that I decided to end the practice of writing birthday poems for my loved ones. Space does not allow me to explain why I stopped, but after more than five years of writing them, I feel that I have done enough.
You do not really know me. Nevertheless, I know quite a lot about you — and it is all good. Your father came into my life some months before you were born. He was the only African-American who did not totally abandon me to the state-sanctioned darkness that is death row in the USA.
I would like for you to know why, I think, your poem did not reach you. After writing those poems, I attached each to a personal letter. I placed your poem and letter into a small envelope with your name on the front. I then placed that inside a larger envelope that contained your father's poem and letter; the latter was stamped, addressed and sent to your father. I suspect that it got lost during the grief and collective upheaval surrounding your father's death.
Since your birthday and his are separated by only one day, it is my hope that you will consider this essay my way of wishing you a continual Happy Birthday, albeit belated, all year long. It may be that you can take some degree of comfort in knowing that I loved your father too.
The correspondence between your father and myself (while often irregular) was intense. It was always laced — if not filled — with "brother stuff", as your father sometimes called it. Do you know what I mean, Maya? Your father was like my big brother. To give you an idea of what I mean, here is the last poem that I wrote for his birthday.
THANK YOU BIG BROTHER LEON
I have missed our illuminating banter
Please forgive the absence of my song;
Your communicative thoughts and candor,
For their strengths, keep me holding on
Without them life would be pure rancor.
THANK YOU BIG BROTHER LEON
Early on in our correspondence, with obvious pride and delight, your father wrote of holding you a few days after your birth and of being awed once again by the beautiful mystery of life. Even on paper I could feel how he was humbled by life's gift of you to him. In that same letter — as he wrote of his opposition to capital punishment — he likened my desire to write publicly, from the darkness of a death row prison cell to "every man's final song and dance".
He encouraged me to write about my experiences on death row and elsewhere, but he knew that I did not know quite how to begin. He instructed me well; his support was endless. Of course, he was also capable of being very critical. That is to say that he had a way of being critical that always left me feeling as if he had given me a very special gift. He taught me to love the essence of criticism whether it, or its source, is "good or bad". Your father was a great man.
In the third and fourth lines of your poem, I wrote "Yes, into your own greatness your must aspire/ Because the roots of your knowledge are known". What I meant for those lines to convey to you is that your very own special goodness is emerging for all to see, yet, while you are the product of great stock, i.e. your mother and father, there is a unique you coming for us all to be inspired by. But perhaps you know that already.
Despite the fact that I have never met you face to face, I have always been aware of the greatness of your spirit via your father's care for me. It continues to be a privilege to know the goodness of you — even second hand. As your song and dance have only just begun, where this life's pathway is brightest, my journey along the way has been both dark and light. We must take heart, dear Maya, for there is comfort for you, and me, in our knowing that all journeys lead to eternity; and, that those parts of mine that I so foolishly plunged into darkness have been immeasurably illuminated by the brotherly brilliance of your father's guiding light.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He welcomes letters commenting on his columns (include your name and full return address on the envelope, or prison authorities may refuse to deliver it). He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G3-63, Georgia Diagnostic & Classification Prison, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]