When I was a child, our home was full of broken things. A coffee cup was never discarded because it no longer possessed a handle. It simply was repurposed into a water glass. I didn't have much money to buy my mother a gift so when I got a chance to head into town to a second hand store I would take my change and search through all the chipped and cracked items never noticing their imperfections only that somewhere among them was the perfect gift for mama.
When I came upon Alice Walker's poem, I Will Keep Broken Things, it reached right into that little girl inside me. My family knew of my love for collecting broken things, but they didn't know the secret I kept that had broken me. Through her words I saw myself and the broken things in me that birthed my passion to write.
Here is an excerpt from Alice's poem:
In my house
there
remains
an
honored
shelf
on which
I will
keep
broken
things.
Their beauty
is
they
need
not
ever
be
'fixed.'
You can read the entire poem here.
In my search for the poem I found a video of Alice Walker reading her poem.