Among the crowds flowing in and out of Artwork Network on Santa Fe Drive during this month’s First Friday art walk were several young people carrying a microphone and speaker. They held a brief discussion about whether they should perform in the main gallery space before deciding they might be too intense for the casual observer and so they headed downstairs.
They were Art From Ashes poets, just as was Andrea Scherer, the young woman about whom I wrote this week. It was in her memory they gathered. They carried with them poems, their own, Andrea’s, and when they spoke, their language crackled: “He’s so sharp, he could cut you just by lookin’. “
The young poets performed, bashful and bold. The gallery grew crowded, louder, the curious pausing for a few moments before moving on.
The final youth poet of the night was Chance Two Crow. He stepped up to the microphone, shoulders taut like a boxer entering the ring. He’d only met Andrea, whom he knew as Rinu, a couple of times. Nonetheless, she was one of the loose-knit family of poets, the youth of the streets or the corner who found if they could sit still for a few minutes, they could capture the pounding of their hearts on paper. If those words they wrote were honest, the young poets learned, they could take the phrases, the syllables, from paper and push them into the air, poetry/song/plea/demand, and the world would stop.
I’d met Chance a day earlier. I’d read his work before, even quoted it here, briefly, when writing about how I had forgotten the way in which the grim and radiant coexist in young people. Catherine O’Neill Thorn, the founder and executive director of Art From Ashes, told me Chance had undergone a remarkable transformation in the few years she’d known him. She works a lot with what she calls broken children, youth who have come to believe they have no value. She says: “You have to believe in them until they can believe in themselves.”
Chance came from a troubled home life, the details of which are not necessary, except to say that by 13 he was an angry kid. He made choices he would come to regret.
“You hear all the time that you’re a bad kid, you eventually stop trying to show people you’re not. You say, OK, and you stop trying. I stopped trying,” he says. “So, there I was, 19, running around in the streets and my brother, Chase, told me I should go to this poetry workshop at The Spot. I’d been writing since I was 13. I kept journals, but it was personal, my heart, my feelings. I didn’t want anyone to know me that well. But that was my thing, writing every day.”
He was skeptical, but he slipped into the workshop and “was just blown away. These kids were just opening their hearts to a roomful of strangers. My bones started shaking. I kept thinking, ‘I gotta get up there.’ I’d found a place where I fit in.”
That was three years ago. It’s not been easy, but Chance describes himself this way: “I was an angry kid who found a reason to be happy.”
He now sits on the Art From Ashes board and works for Mile High Youth Corps. He performs throughout the metro area. He’s training to lead youth poetry workshops.
“I want to inspire people,” he says. “I still have that anger, but it’s more toward people who don’t shed light where it needs to be shed, where people are scared or alone or in danger. It comes now from wanting to make a difference.”
At the gallery, Chance steps up to the microphone and says: “I wrote this when I heard about Rinu, and everything I’m saying in here I’m saying I wish I could do, but they are all things we can do if we all devote ourselves to our mission. We just need to try harder.”
He raises his voice then:
“I wish I was a hero then I would save you
I wish I was a hero then I would take you
away from ya pain away from ya madness
shoulder your tears and soak up your sadness
I wish that I could save my people from their pain.
Help you change your ways and teach you to be brave
I’d fill your empty stomach wipe tears from your eyes
When no one’s there to listen lend my ears to your cries
And I wish . . . I wish I could give hope to the hopeless
When the nights are the coldest I could shelter the homeless
And I wish . . . I wish it wasn’t like this but it doesn’t go away just because you close your eyelids . . .”
He keeps reading, words rushing, then slowing, a dance of words in a room that’s fallen silent. You wonder how the radiant can spring from the grim? It happens in places you do not expect, at times you cannot predict, and when it does, it’s easy to recognize for the gift it is.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
