My third grade teacher said it so often
that her roomful of 1960s peace-and-love
8-year-olds automatically chimed in
as the first words fell from her lips:

There’s no need to be mean.

All these decades later I like to think
that my former classmates and I have not
given up on peace and love, that we believe in
you-can-always-do-something-for-someone
good will—

a small kindness, a simple act of generosity—
reminding us that compassion exists
even as people perpetrate acts of violence,
of oppression, of meanness,
all of it needless.

And on a day when the world learns of
even more brutalities committed
by the nation I think of as mine,

I take myself into the sunshine of a summer
morning, the sky blue-ing, as it does,
through the deep green of live oak leaves
holding unanswerable questions, and say
to nothing and everything:

Let me do a small, kind thing
for someone in this moment, which
is all we ever have, all we can ever do,
giving rather than giving up.

Let the cracks in my heart
break me open, and let love
waterfall its way downstream
to those who need it most.

Then let me do it again
tomorrow and the tomorrow
after that, for all the tomorrows
I may be granted.