#AmericanWriters
I shall not sing a May song. A May song should be gay. I’ll wait until November And sing a song of gray. I’ll wait until November
Into her mother’s bedroom to wash… “My mother is jelly-hearted and sh… Sweet, quiver-soft, irrelevant. N… Only a habit would cry if she shou… A pleasant sort of fool without th…
—And when you have forgotten the b… And most especially when you have… When you have forgotten Sunday ha… Or me sitting on the front-room ra… Looking off down the long street
I put my seed into the ground And said, 'I’ll watch it grow.’ I watered it and cared for it As well as I could know. One day I walked in my back yard,
From the first it had been like a Ballad. It had the beat inevitabl… A wildness cut up, and tied in lit… Like the four-line stanzas of the… understood—the ballads they had se…
arrive. The Ladies from the Ladie… Arrive in the afternoon, the late… In diluted gold bars across the bo… Of proud, seamed faces with mercy… Here, there, interrupting, all dee…
you did not know you were Afrika When you set out for Afrika you did not know you were going. Because you did not know you were Afrika.
One wants a teller in a time like… One’s not a man, one’s not a woman… To bear enormous business all alon… One cannot walk this winding stree… Straight-shouldered, tranquil-eyed…
The good man. He is still enhancer, renouncer. In the time of detachment, in the time of the vivid heather a… in the time of oral
Blackness is a title, is a preoccupation, is a commitment Blacks are to comprehend—
Already I am no longer looked at… My daughters and sons have put me… Are gone from the house. My husband and lovers are pleasant… And night is night.
Mayor. Worldman. Historyman. Beyond steps that occur and close, your steps are echo-makers. You can never be forgotten. We begin our health.
AS SEEN BY DISCIPLINES There they are. Thirty at the corner. Black, raw, ready. Sores in the city
of the furious Who take Today and jerk it out of… have made new underpinnings and a… Blacktime is time for chimeful poemhood
We are things of dry hours and the… Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” mate… Like “rent”, “feeding a wife”, “sa… But could a dream sent up through… Its white and violet, fight with f…