It’s a privilege to have Gordon Parks’ meditation on being alive.   His wonderment of creation and of a high creator as a guiding force is expressed in words and pictures – to begin.  Not sticking to the Biblical translation of Genesis, Parks conjures up his own meaning of beginnings.  The accompanying image shows a moon like a yellow half pie, suspended in a black sky; it hangs over a vermilion firmament; from below linear sheafs blossom with pale yellow buds, reaching for the brighter moon.

Like the filmmaker and screenwriter he was, Parks moves from the broad abstraction of creation to a close-up of his personal becoming.  Written in 2005, a year before he died at age 93, Parks looks back on nine decades of hopes, dreams, nightmares and struggles.  Love and faith instilled by his parents gave him a sense of worth above and beyond skin color.  They gave him a sense of “can do”.  In a tribute to his mother, the poem “THE FINAL HOURS” faces a sepia photo of a dying woman with her hand lifting out of the covers.

Throughout the book, Parks uses hands as a motif – the back of an open hand touches the top edge of a photo next to the story of the martyred Martin Luther King. And opposite the poem “NO APPOLOGIES”, a brown hand is either reaching or sinking in a sea of red water.

Eyes with Winged Thoughts see flying birds appearing in photos next to poems about the passage of time.  He also says:  “Time smiled, touched my shoulder, and told me things I’d never heard before.  Now and then certain wonders of the universe descend carefully from the Maker’s hands and, one by one, fall into a chosen space to blot out emptiness.”

But there is humor too.  About aging, Parks says, “Recently my memory is slippery, like an eel.  The spectacles that were missing this morning were kind enough to turn up on my head.”  He says,  “Funny, things I forget are often more significant than the things I remember.”

In keeping with his activist and photojournalist lifestyle, Parks writes and shows photos of soldiers silhouetted in battle, guns in hands, either fleeing or attacking in Iraq.  He sees America as a wounded eagle.  Then using a portrait of an Asian woman in despair, looking at her empty hands, he laments the destructive power of the last great Tsunami.  Yet, one can tell Parks is a musician by the cadence of his lines and the codas of his distress.

Measured throughout the book Parks speaks of love and hope.  He is an optimist.  He says, “Despite the turmoil, anguish and despair disrupting the planet we inherited, there is something good I choose to sing about.  That something lies within us, patiently waiting – beneath us, above us and around us.”

This is a slender book, only 128 pages, but it speaks volumes.