A Brief But Spectacular take on forgiveness

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• Amna Nawaz:

  Ramya Ramana is an award-winning author, poet and lyricist. She was a winner of the Youth Poet Laureate of New York City Award. And in addition to performing and writing, she's also worked as an educator and mentor for young women and poets.

  Tonight, she shares her Brief But Spectacular take on forgiveness.

• Ramya Ramana, Poet:

  I think, to be a creative, you have to be a listener first. You have to be able to observe the world around you and to observe yourself and how you move through the world.

  I was born in Queens to immigrant parents from India. We spent a few years of life there before we moved to Long Island. I had a big family. We had our parents, our grandparents, our uncle, just one big Indian family in a household.

  Today, I will be performing a piece about forgiveness.

  Forgiveness is a doorway. A garden of curses spill from her lips and the city inside me crumbles. I tell myself, all poison has once been poisoned too.

  Forgiveness has been a journey for me and a freeing one. I have realized that being able to forgive releases you from the prison of what you endured, and it allows you to restore yourself to a childlike state of wonder.

  I think of images of grace as a remedy, the ground revealing itself after a cruel winter of snow, a bed of roses growing where a home once burned.

  The person or the people that I'm forgiving is generational forgiveness. It's a forgiveness that is beyond me.

  The temptation is high to be right and to be self-righteous about my rightness, to make a place out of the megaphone of resentment, though I know this road leads to where it always does, an empty, lonely mansion.

  A lot of what I'm curious to write about as I grow and as I develop is to be able to tap into something that is eternal and that is timeless and apply that to my work, that whatever my intimacy is with the timeless, the eternal, out of overflow, it can reach other people. It can somehow, touch other people.

  Grace declutters the noise, so I can reenter the girlhood I long for. For the little girl in her that never got to live, a little girl in me will. Forgiveness is a doorway to return to the home of myself, that quiet garden, a quartet of tenderness.

  (Cheering and Applause)

• Ramya Ramana:

  My name is Ramya Ramana, and this is my Brief But Spectacular on forgiveness.