This is an opinion column.
A young man stood on a stage last week at Samford University in Birmingham. He was so nervous, walking up to face 600 people he did not know, that he wondered for a moment if he was crazy to do it.
Just a moment.
“I start thinking … I don’t know what I got myself into this time,” he said. “I was so scared to get on stage. But once I was up there it was too late. I couldn’t just run off stage. I couldn’t.”
So Devin Bridges spoke. With words of power.
“We aren’t that different,” he began. “I’m a person just like you.”
Bridges is 18, a big guy, tall and broad, with a voice like a sportscaster, when he uses it. He likes basketball, and Pokémon, and anime, and thinks of himself as a regular teenager.
“Maybe I do a little bit less than the average teenager,” he acknowledges. “I kind of stick around the house, read books and write. I play a couple games here and there.”
He has attended Maranathan Academy, a Birmingham school for critically at-risk students, since his ninth grade year. For many students, Maranathan offers the last shot at education, whether because of circumstances beyond their control or because of their own mistakes. Bridges came there after spotty internet access during COVID made remote learning at his former school difficult.
He took writing classes at Maranathan from Birmingham author T.K. Thorne, who encouraged him to use his voice, and to be judicious with his words. He went to places like the Alabama Holocaust Education Center, where he thought about horrors in the world both globally and locally. He thought of pain, and overcoming, and peace and injustice – however that might manifest.
And he graduated in the Spring, as valedictorian.
It was through the Holocaust center that Bridges found himself on stage last week. Organizers of the event, L’ Chaim, a fundraiser for the center with the theme of “the power of conversation,” asked him to write a poem, he said. They left the specifics to him, but told him the event “was about peace and coming together.”
“I just started thinking about what’s going on in the world right now and how that affects me,” he said. “We all share a lot of common problems.”
So he stood onstage, at a Baptist college, at a fundraiser for a Jewish organization, speaking to a large and diverse crowd about togetherness in a world that too often seems to be coming apart.
If he was frightened it did not show, in his voice or his demeanor or his words.
The name of his poem is “On The Horizon:”
We aren’t that different
I’m a person just like you
I eat and sleep just like you
I seek guidance just like you
I laugh
I smile
I cry
And I dream
I worry about what tomorrow brings
All of its uncertainty
We speak similar languages
And read the same texts
I dream of better days
Days without hunger
Days without thirst
Days without stress
Days without guilt
Days without anxiety
Days without regret
Days without anger
Days without hatred
Days without feeling ashamed of who I am
Days of comfort in who we are
Days of courage
Days of a much needed change
Days where I am loved
Days where my imperfections are not an object of ridicule
Days in which we embrace our differences and similarities
Days without distractions
Days without discomfort
Days without mental setbacks
Days without feeling lost
Days without egos
Days without a powerful uniform or badge to hold you down
Days without being haunted by your own kin
Days without an overwhelming need for money
Days without discrimination
Days of smiling faces
Days of endless laughter
Days of unity
Days of unyielding love and joy
Days of shared stories
Days spent together
You me the neighborhood together
Days of understanding
Days of our shared culture
Days used to cultivate the youth
Breeding those better days I dream of
I dream of peace on the horizon
The crowd cheered as Bridges finished, as if appreciative of his strength, or his words, or the notion of peace itself.
The first thing he did when he got offstage was text his mother, who was in the audience. Was it good, he asked. Was he loud enough? Did he come off as nervous?
“She sent me like three texts so fast just saying how fantastic I was,” he said. “She said that she cried.”
She was – I am here to attest – not alone.
Bridges had been afraid of standing up there in front of all those people. But he stood, and he did what he was there to do. The world is better because of it.
And so is he. The response was overwhelming.
“Afterwards I was so surprised,” he said. “I couldn’t stop smiling. My cheeks have just been hurting from smiling.”
John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner.
