I'm So Glad I Was Born 7 Pankhurst 18 What Is the Color of Your Skin? 28 You Writers Who Are Trying to Write 36 All the Engineers Perished 49 What Are You Doing for the Cause? 60 I Claim Everything for the People 70 To Leave No Door Unopened 79 Have You Sold Your Soul for Dirt? 90 When I Look Into the Faces 101 Loving is the Only Life 111 Keep Your Face to the Sun 121 I never found any use for birth or birthdays, dear comrades, till I knew what it was to love: I could not tell how successful my life is by the number of those who love me: I could only tell that by the number of those I love: I am victorious only when I have won my love of you from myself: winning your love of me from you is not enough: And so this day though you may not gather me to you I gather you to me, body and spirit: And so this day I count myself up, not in figures but in love, and say forgiving and jubilant things to my soul about us all. I'M SO GLAD I WAS BORN I'm so glad I was born. It seemed so right for me to come. And some day it will seem just right for me to go. Maybe not just yet but sometime. I dont know whether it matters much which side of mystery God feeds me on. I am fed. Here or there, nowhere or anywhere, I am joyous, a part of things, not to be skipped--an atom but for which the stars would not hold together. That's enough for any sane man to know about himself. Yet that's not all I know about myself. I know God made no mistake making me. Or making you, either. Saint or scoundrel, making anybody. I can see other things put aside for my entrance. The Lord said: Give him a show. So I was piloted to this earth-star. Nobody specially welcomed me. My father and mother were there. And a few others. Some may have been sorry. But luckily I was there and in my baby way welcomed myself. I did not rock in that first cradle and say nothing. Think of the journeys I had lived through and sung through before I got here. Think of gods and men and animals and suns and all sorts of soul stuffs and body stuffs that compounded to produce me. Is it any wonder I am stuck on myself after that? I would not be paying great tribute to what went before or to what is to come after if I did not stand here now in great pride and declare the wonder of my flesh and the wonder of my spirit. I tell you gods are all right. Yes, and the law of gravitation is all right. Yes, and Beethoven and Socrates and Lincoln were all right. But how about me? Am I not just as much all right? Suppose an impossibility. Suppose I had not been born. Suppose something had sidetracked me. What would have