Invictus

This poem was read aloud on The NY Times podcast yesterday because it was one of John Lewis' favorite poems. I have been fascinated but the retrospectives of his life in activism and in politics, and this adds a cherry on the top. At 23, he was one of the youngest speakers at the 1963 March on Washington, and had been the last remaining speaker alive. I certainly did not have the courage of conviction at that age. He was the son of an Alabama sharecropper, and his speech accepting the National Book Award is especially moving. 

This poem bears repeating in celebration of such a life.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

      Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

      For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

      I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

      Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

      Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

      How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

      I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

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He also visited a San Diego Comic-Con, where he showed attendees what a real-life superhero looks like.
He dressed in a trench coat and a backpack, a nod to the outfit he wore while marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, 50 years ago. He reenacted that famous march with Comic-Con attendees, saying "our children are the future."

 

via {huff post}