"To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty."

Source : 1978 Keynote address for Child Welfare League of America. Collected as 'Old Stories: New Lives' in Moving Towards Home (1989).

June Jordan

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