Where humanitysowed faith, hope, and unity, joy’s garden blossomed.

There is no envy, jealousy, or hatred between the different colors of the rainbow. And no fear either. Because each one exists to make the others’ love more beautiful.

The glorification of hatred is predicated on a foundation of fear-induced ignorance venomous to haters and those they believe they hate.

We ache with the yearningthat turns half into wholeand offer no excusesfor the beauty of our souls.

Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences, like love and weeping and laughter, common to all human beings.

If the idea of loving those whom you have been taught to recognize as your enemies is too overwhelming, consider more deeply the observation that we are all much more alike than we are unalike.

The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else’s children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose.

As we encounter each other, we see our diversity — of background, race, ethnicity, belief – and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.

Beneath the armor of skin/and/bone/and/mindmost of our colors are amazingly the same.

The city of Paris, France, became a place of refuge for biracial Americans during slavery and at the time of the Harlem Renaissance for black musicians, fine artists, writers and others seeking opportunities to practice their craft free from American racism.

The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.