Countee Cullen

Yet Do I Marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Countee Cullen

 

for Harold Jackman

Love Tree
Come, let us plant our love as farmers plant
A seed, and you shall water it with tears,
And I shall weed it with my hands until
They bleed. Perchance this buried love of ours
Will feed on goodly ground and bear a tree
With fruit and flowers; pale lovers chancing
May pluck and eat, and through their veins a sweet
And languid ardor play, their pulses beat
An unimagined tune, their shy lips meet
And part, and bliss repeat again. And men
Will pilgrimage from far and wide to see
This tree for which we two were crucified,
And, happy in themselves, will never know
‘Twas break of heart that made the Love Tree grow.

Countee Cullen

     

                            Atlantic City Waiter

                             With subtle poise he grips his tray

   Of delicate things to eat;
Choice viands to their mouths half way,
   The ladies watch his feet

Go carving dexterous avenues
   Through sly intricacies;
Ten thousand years on jungle clues
   Alone shaped feet like these.

For him to be humble who is proud
   Needs colder artifice;
Though half his pride is disavowed,
   In vain the sacrifice.

Sheer through his acquiescent mask
   Of bland gentility,
The jungle flames like a copper cask
   Set where the sun strikes free.

Countee Cullen

Incident

Once riding in old Baltimore,   

   Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,   

I saw a Baltimorean

   Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,

   And he was no whit bigger,

And so I smiled, but he poked out

   His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore

   From May until December;

Of all the things that happened there

   That’s all that I remember.

Countee Cullen

from The Dark Tower

We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit,
Not always countenance, abject and mute,
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;
Not everlastingly while others sleep
Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,
Not always bend to some more subtle brute;
We were not made eternally to weep.

The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,
White stars is no less lovely being dark,
And there are buds that cannot bloom at all
In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;
So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,
And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

Gwendolyn Brooks

 

kitchenette building

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,

Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong

Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”

But could a dream send up through onion fumes

Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes

And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,

Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,

Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,

Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!

Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,

We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

Le Roi Jones

 

THE TURNCOAT

The steel fibrous slant & ribboned glint

of water. The Sea. Even my secret speech is moist

with it. When I am alone & brooding, locked in

with dull memories & self hate, & the terrible disorder

of a young man.

I move slowly. My cape spread stiff & pressing cautiously

in the first night wind off the Hudson. I glide down

onto my own roof, peering in at the pitiful shadow of myself.

How can it mean anything? The stop & spout, the

wind’s dumb shift. Creak of the house & wet smells

coming in. Night forms on my left. The blind still

up to admit a sun that no longer exists. Sea move.

I dream long bays & towers . . . & soft steps on moist sand.

I become them, sometimes. Pure flight. Pure fantasy. Lean.

Gwendolyn Brooks

To The Diaspora

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. 
You did not know the Black continent 
that had to be reached 
was you. 

I could not have told you then that some sun 
would come, 
somewhere over the road, 
would come evoking the diamonds 
of you, the Black continent-- 
somewhere over the road. 
You would not have believed my mouth. 

When I told you, meeting you somewhere close 
to the heat and youth of the road, 
liking my loyalty, liking belief, 
you smiled and you thanked me but very little believed me. 

Here is some sun. Some. 
Now off into the places rough to reach. 
Though dry, though drowsy, all unwillingly a-wobble, 
into the dissonant and dangerous crescendo. 
Your work, that was done, to be done to be done to be done. 

Gwendolyn Brooks

Sadie and Maud

Maud went to college.

Sadie stayed at home.

Sadie scraped life

With a fine-tooth comb.

She didn’t leave a tangle in.

Her comb found every strand.

Sadie was one of the livingest chits

In all the land.

Sadie bore two babies

Under her maiden name.

Maud and Ma and Papa

Nearly died of shame.

When Sadie said her last so-long

Her girls struck out from home.

(Sadie had left as heritage

Her fine-tooth comb.)

Maud, who went to college,

Is a thin brown mouse.

She is living all alone

In this old house.

Gwendolyn Brooks

 a song in the front yard

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.

I want a peek at the back

Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.   

A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now   

And maybe down the alley,

To where the charity children play.   

I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.

They have some wonderful fun.

My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine

How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.   

My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae   

Will grow up to be a bad woman.

That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late

(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.

And I’d like to be a bad woman, too,

And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace   

And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

Gwendolyn Brooks

 

To the Young Who Want to Die

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.

The gun will wait. The lake will wait.

The tall gall in the small seductive vial

will wait will wait:

will wait a week: will wait through April.

You do not have to die this certain day.

Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.

I assure you death will wait. Death has

a lot of time. Death can

attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is

just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;

can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.

Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness.

Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.

Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

Amiri Baraka

Snake Eyes 

  

That force is lost 

which shaped me, spent 

in its image, battered, an old brown thing 

swept off the streets 

where it sucked its 

gentle living. 

                        And what is meat 

to do, that is driven to its end 

by words? The frailest gestures grown 

like skirts around breathing. 

                                                        We take 

unholy risks to prove 

we are what we cannot be. For instance,  

  

I am not even crazy. 

Lucille Clifton

why some people be mad at me sometimes

 

they ask me to remember 

but they want me to remember 

their memories 

and i keep on remembering 

mine 

Wanda Coleman

from.  Greatest Hits 1966–2003. Pudding House Press (2004)

Eager to make my mark on the literary landscape, I got busy finding the mentors who would teach me in lieu of the college education I could not afford. As a result, I have developed a style composed of styles sometimes waxing traditional, harking to the neoformalists, but most of my poems are written in a sometimes frenetic, sometimes lyrical free verse, dotted with literary, musical, and cinematic allusions, accented with smatterings of German, Latin, Spanish, and Yiddish, and neologisms, and rife with various cants and jargons, as they capture my interest, from the corporate roundtables to the streets.

Wanda Coleman

In No Time at All 

after John Ashbery

No charges of treason — yet — so the property

 remains untouched if not untaxed.

 And surely bigger banks and asses have been broken

 in half or into, making for happy thieves.

 Timeless hands have made valueless change.

 (Honey, here you are with a toothpick

 when what’s required is a meat cleaver.)

 The TV trays are all set up, dinner’s in the oven,

 There’s raspberry trifle for dessert.

 A robe awaits wearer, hangs limp and ill-formed,

 gathers light and stillness and regrets.

 The logic of wicks made for a proper burn,

 patches of light illuminating the gray,

 the house seems lighter if no less solemn

 now that the departed has returned home.

 The diary contains cries of every color,

 an orchard of thorn and briar and bane.

 The academy of the future has closed doors.

 It is unwilling — books banned, curtains drawn.

 

Wanda Coleman

with Richard Berry& Michelle T. Clinton

 

Watching

the television on 
tv tray by the bedstead, plate of food 
fish odor rising and blue cheese dressing 
the curling upward of smoke 
outside raining 
kids in the bedroom playing, squeals of laughter 
die down as bed time approaches and grabs them 
the television, on 
black and white people moving in fantastic world 
tv tray by the bedstead, plate of food empty 
stale smell of cigarette smoke 
me in bed, watching--waiting 
clock ticks raucous 
boom boom boom bass sound of neighbor's stereo below 
faint voice of woman yelling in apartment next door 
looking at the window, stars break thru the rain 
letting up 
bang bang bang, cops and robbers on television 
the book, open, lays face down beside me 
sleep runs away every time i reach for it 
i am hungry--feeding time at the vagina 
half-naked i hide between sheets 
he lays there with me 32 years dead 
his corpse shows no sign of life 
he can't fool me 
one eye is watching television 

Wanda Coleman

American Sonnet (35)

boooooooo. spooky ripplings of icy waves. this 
umpteenth time she returns--this invisible woman 
long on haunting short on ectoplasm

"you're a good man, sistuh," a lover sighed solongago. 
"keep your oil slick and your motor running."

wretched stained mirrors within mirrors of 
fractured webbings like nests of manic spiders 
reflect her ruined mien (rue wiggles remorse 
squiggles woe jiggles bestride her). oozy Manes spill 
out yonder spooling in night's lofty hour exudes 
her gloom and spew in rankling odor of heady dour

as she strives to retrieve flesh to cloak her bones 
again to thrive to keep her poisoned id alive

usta be young usta be gifted--still black 

Wanda Coleman

Requiem for a Nest 

the winged thang built her dream palace

amid the fine green eyes of a sheltering bough

she did not know it was urban turf

disguised as serenely delusionally rural

nor did she know the neighborhood was rife

with slant-mawed felines and those long-taloned

swoopers of prey. she was ignorant of the acidity & oil

that slowly polluted the earth, and was never

to detect the serpent coiled one strong limb below

following her nature she flitted and dove

for whatever blades twigs and mud

could be found under the humming blue

and created a hatchery for her spawn

not knowing all were doomed

Wanda Coleman

 American Sonnet 51

in my last incarnation i inoculated myself

with oodles of dago red and stumbled into fame

without falling. i worshipped in the temple of Lady Day

and took Coltrane as my wizard. i always wore my mink coat

to the Laundromat and drank pale champagne with my

soft-boiled eggs. i believed King Kong got a raw deal.

i believe great and prolonged sex cured cancer. i believed

in the afterdeath. i was liberator of cough-and-gaggers

from the cages of their spew. i scavenged rusted auto parts,

built a niggah machine, loaded it with atomic amour and

wiped out all purveyors of poverty. . . swapped my pink

pearl for a black sapphire. and then one quincentennial

i rose from the magnificent effluvium of my jazz

to discover my children did not know me

Henry David Thoreau

Benjamin Dexter Maxham. Daguerrotype. (1856)

from Slavery in Massachusetts (1854)

The Liberator and the Commonwealth were the only papers in Boston, as far as I know, which made themselves heard in condemnation of the cowardice and meanness of the authorities of that city, as exhibited in '51. The other journals, almost without exception, by their manner of referring to and speaking of the Fugitive Slave Law, and the carrying back of the slave Sims, insulted the common sense of the country, at least. And, for the most part, they did this, one would say, because they thought so to secure the approbation of their patrons, not being aware that a sounder sentiment prevailed to any extent in the heart of the Commonwealth. I am told that some of them have improved of late; but they are still eminently time-serving. Such is the character they have won.

But, thank fortune, this preacher can be even more easily reached by the weapons of the reformer than could the recreant priest. The free men of New England have only to refrain from purchasing and reading these sheets, have only to withhold their cents, to kill a score of them at once. One whom I respect told me that he purchased Mitchell's Citizen in the cars, and then threw it out the window. But would not his contempt have been more fatally expressed if he had not boughtit?

Are they Americans? are they New Englanders? are they inhabitants of Lexington and Concord and Framingham, who read and support the Boston Post, Mail, Journal, Advertiser, Courier, and Times? Are these the Flags of our Union? I am not a newspaper reader, and may omit to name theworst.

Could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some of these journals exhibit? Is there any dust which their conduct does not lick, and make fouler still with its slime? I do not know whether the Boston Herald is still in existence, but I remember to have seen it about the streets when Sims was carried off. Did it not act its part well-serve its master faithfully! How could it have gone lower on its belly? How can a man stoop lower than he is low? do more than put his extremities in the place of the head he has? than make his head his lower extremity? When I have taken up this paper with my cuffs turned up, I have heard the gurgling of the sewer through every column. I have felt that I was handling a paper picked out of the public gutters, a leaf from the gospel of the gambling-house, the groggery, and the brothel, harmonizing with the gospel of the Merchants' Exchange.

The majority of the men of the North, and of the South and East and West, are not men of principle. If they vote, they do not send men to Congress on errands of humanity; but while their brothers and sisters are being scourged and hung for loving liberty, while— I might here insert all that slavery implies and is— it is the mismanagement of wood and iron and stone and gold which concerns them. Do what you will, O Government, with my wife and children, my mother and brother, my father and sister, I will obey your commands to the letter. It will indeed grieve me if you hurt them, if you deliver them to overseers to be hunted by bounds or to be whipped to death; but, nevertheless, I will peaceably pursue my chosen calling on this fair earth, until perchance, one day, when I have put on mourning for them dead, I shall have persuaded you to relent. Such is the attitude, such are the words of Massachusetts.

Rather than do thus, I need not say what match I would touch, what system endeavor to blow up; but as I love my life, I would side with the light, and let the dark earth roll from under me, calling my mother and my brother to follow. I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No matter how valuable law may be to protect your property, even to keep soul and body together, if it do not keep you and humanity together.

H.D. Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854)