Photo: Mark Sagliocco/2015 Getty Images

Jesse Williams has received his deserved share of praise for his powerful speech accepting his Humanitarian Award at the BET Awards last week. Literary luminary Alice Walker apparently wanted to ensure that her words didn’t get lost in a sea of compliments, so she wrote a poem in honor of Williams’s big moment, entitled “Here It Is,” and published it on her website. After voicing her annoyance that Williams’s speech came right after a McDonald’s commercial (“Surely there is a better way to honor our people than by encouraging belief that such a corporation cares about what they eat, unless it makes money for the corporation”), Walker explains in her intro that she wanted to write a poem “about fear of blackness in white culture.”

The poem, as follows:

Here it is

the beauty that scares you

-so you believe-

to death.

For he is certainly gorgeous

and he is certainly where whiteness

to your disbelief

has not wandered off

to die.

No. It is there, tawny skin, gray eyes,

a Malcolm-esque jaw. His loyal parents

may Goddess bless them

sitting proud and happy and no doubt

amazed

at what they have done.

For he is black too. And obviously

with a soul

made of everything.

Try to think bigger than you ever have

or had courage enough to do:

that blackness is not where whiteness

wanders off to die: but that it is

like the dark matter

between stars and galaxies in

the Universe

that ultimately

holds it all

together.