• A chick that will grow into a cock can be spotted the very day it hatches.
  
  
• A child's fingers are not scalded by a piece of hot yam which his mother puts into his palm.
  
  
• An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.
  
  
• A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness.
  
  
• A proud heart can survive a general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride.
  
  
• As the dog said, 'If I fall down for you and you fall down for me, it is playing.'
  
  
• A wise man who knows proverbs, reconciles difficulties. (Yoruba)
  
  
• Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped.
  
  
• If a child washes his hands he could eat with kings.
  
  
• If you don't stand for something, you will fall for something.
  
  
• It takes a whole village to raise a child
  
  
• Looking at a king's mouth one would never think he sucked his mother's breast.
  
  
• People should not talk while they are eating or pepper may go down the wrong way.
  
  
• The lizard that jumped from the high iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no one else did.
  
  
• The mouth which eats does not talk.
  
  
• The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.
  
  
• Those whose palm-kernels were cracked for them by a benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble.
  
  
• When a man says yes, his chi (personal god) says yes also.
  
  
• When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.
  
  
• You can tell a ripe corn by its look.
  
  
• You must judge a man by the work of his hands.
  

Spring Quiet

by Christina Georgina Rossetti

The Grapevine

John Ashbery

Of who we and all they are
You all now know. But you know
After they began to find us out we grew
Before they died thinking us the causes

Of their acts. Now we'll not know
The truth of some still at the piano, though
They often date from us, causing
These changes we think we are. We don't care

Though, so tall up there
In young air. But things get darker as we move
To ask them: Whom must we get to know
To die, so you live and we know

UNDER THE HARVEST MOON

     UNDER the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

     Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

Carl Sandburg

Flower of Love

by Oscar Wilde

TO AMERICA

James Weldon Johnson

How would you have us, as we are?
Or sinking 'neath the load we bear?
Our eyes fixed forward on a star?
Or gazing empty at despair?

Rising or falling? Men or things?
With dragging pace or footsteps fleet?
Strong, willing sinews in your wings?
Or tightening chains about your feet?

A Poet Is Not a Jukebox

Dudley Randall

A poet is not a jukebox, so don’t tell me what to write.
I read a dear friend a poem about love, and she said,
“You’re in to that bag now, for whatever it’s worth,
But why don’t you write about the riot in Miami?”

I didn’t write about Miami because I didn’t know about Miami.
I’ve been so busy working for the Census, and listening to music all night,
and making new poems
That I’ve broken my habit of watching TV and reading newspapers.
So it wasn’t absence of Black Pride that caused me not to write about Miami,
But simple ignorance.

Telling a Black poet what he ought to write
Is like some Commissar of Culture in Russia telling a poet
He’d better write about the new steel furnaces in the Novobigorsk region,
Or the heroic feats of Soviet labor in digging the trans-Caucausus Canal,
Or the unprecedented achievement of workers in the sugar beet industry
who exceeded their quota by 400 percent (it was later discovered to
be a typist’s error).

Maybe the Russian poet is watching his mother die of cancer,
Or is bleeding from an unhappy love affair,
Or is bursting with happiness and wants to sing of wine, roses, and nightingales.

I’ll bet that in a hundred years the poems the Russian people will read, sing and love
Will be the poems about his mother’s death, his unfaithful mistress, or his
wine, roses and nightingales,
Not the poems about steel furnaces, the trans-Caucasus Canal, or the sugar
beet industry.
A poet writes about what he feels, what agitates his heart and sets his pen in motion.
Not what some apparatchnik dictates, to promote his own career or theories.

Yeah, maybe I’ll write about Miami, as I wrote about Birmingham,
But it’ll be because I want to write about Miami, not because somebody
says I ought to.

Yeah, I write about love. What’s wrong with love?
If we had more loving, we’d have more Black babies to become Black brothers and
sisters and build the Black family.

When people love, they bathe with sweet-smelling soap, splash their bodies
with perfume or cologne,
Shave, and comb their hair, and put on gleaming silken garments,
Speak softly and kindly and study their beloved to anticipate and satisfy her
every desire.
After loving they’re relaxed and happy and friends with all the world.
What’s wrong with love, beauty, joy and peace?

If Josephine had given Napoleon more loving, he wouldn’t have sown the
meadows of Europe with skulls.
If Hitler had been happy in love, he wouldn’t have baked people in ovens.
So don’t tell me it’s trivial and a cop-out to write about love and not about
Miami.

A poet is not a jukebok.
A poet is not a jukebox.
I repeat, A poet is not a jukebox for someone to shove a quarter in his ear
and get the tune they want to hear,
Or to pat on the head and call “a good little Revolutionary,”
Or to give a Kuumba Liberation Award.

A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.

So don’t tell me what to write.

ONE FOR ALL NEWBORNS
By Thylias Moss

They kick and flail like crabs on their backs.
Parents outside the nursery window do not believe
they might raise assassins or thieves, at the very worst.
a poet or obscure jazz Musician whose politics
spill loudly from his horn.
Everything about it was wonderful, the method
of conception, the gestation, the womb opening
in perfect analogy to the mind's expansion.
Then the dark succession of constricting years,
mother competing with daughter for beauty and losing,
varicose veins and hot-water bottles, joy boiled away,
the arrival of knowledge that eyes are birds with clipped wings,
the sun at a 30° angle and unable to go higher, parents
who cannot push anymore, who stay by the window
looking for signs of spring
and the less familiar gait of grown progeny.
I am now at the age where I must begin to pay
for the way I treated my mother. My daughter is just like me.
The long trip home is further delayed, my presence
keeps the plane on the ground. If I get off, it will fly.
The propeller is a cross spinning like a buzz saw
about to cut through me. I am haunted and my mother is not dead.
The miracle was not birth but that I lived despite my crimes.
I treated God badly also; he is another parent
watching his kids through a window, eager to be proud
of his creation, looking for signs of spring.

Jacket Notes

Ishmael Reed

Being a colored poet
Is like going over
Niagara Falls in a
Barrel

An 8 year old can do what
You do unaided
The barrel maker doesn't
Think you can cut it

The gawkers on the bridge
Hope you fall on your
Face

The tourist bus full of
Paying customers broke-down
Just out of Buffalo

Some would rather dig
The postcards than
Catch your act

A mile from the drink
It begins to storm

But what really hurts is
You're bigger than the 
Barrel

Breakthrough

Carolyn Rodgers

I've had tangled feelings lately
About ev'rything
Bout writing poetry, and otha forms
Bout talkin and dreamin with a
Special man (who says he needs me)
Uh huh
And my mouth has been open
Most of the time but
I ain't been saying nothin but
Thinking about ev'rything
And the partial pain has been
How do I put my self on paper
The way I want to be or am and be
Not like any one else in this
Black world but me

Southern Song

Margaret Walker

I want my body bathed again by southern suns, my soul
        reclaimed again from southern land. I want to rest
        again in southern fields, in grass and hay and clover
        bloom; to lay my hand again upon the clay baked by a
        southern sun, to touch the rain-soaked earth and smell
        the smell of soil.

I want my rest unbroken in the fields of southern earth;
        freedom to watch the corn wave silver in the sun and
        mark the splashing of a brook, a pond with ducks and
        frogs and count the clouds.

I want no mobs to wrench me from my southern rest; no
        forms to take me in the night and burn my shack and
        make for me a nightmare full of oil and flame.

I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to
        stand between my body's southern song--the fusion of
        the South, my body's song and me.

What I Love About Fiction

Turning each page, how fast
they pile up in your left hand,
how your progress is marked
by a bookmark’s steady march
through leaves.
through leaves. And poetry, the opposite:
how slowly you move from poem
to poem, how long it takes
to read one slender volume,
how each night you turn only one
or two pages, carefully,
and then sleep,
like learning to love a skinny
and complicated girl.

—Amy Watkins

Fifty Lines for Al Filreis on his 50 Birthday

Even John Cage worked within the limits of his name.
I am only describing something—and that never stopped
Cage from introducing himself.
You have a question for the six-year-olds;
a question for all-the-same-height third graders;
a question for the spinning middle school kids
who also sing.
You have a follow-up question for the one-word answer:
yes, no, Whitman high school students;
and many questions for the I-like-it, I-don’t-like it
college students—the college students.
And for openers you problemitize “problemitizing”
for the graduate students.
And you have a question for the adults
and many more for yourself.
Or the question you asked me—to gloss
the Wallace Stevens line:
“Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
And where do questions come from—
and where do they go?
“Nothing + Nothing = Something, that is ‘Nothing,’
which is really Something,” I said not knowing
where that came from. But is it all about the questions?
It’s the amplitude you feel, hear, see, and
for the moment—and longer (we hope)—we feel,
hear, and see too.
I am describing you at our limits, that is, our best
failed distinctions.
As there are suppers and there are suppers:
a butterfiled fillet of sole resting on its crunchy skin.
And it’s not that you grew your beard, but
you never shaved it off, and that it continues to grow.
Your beard in its place is an invisible element
of that place—made visible.
Here is a line for not talking, which isn’t silence,
(the privacy of public communion).
Here is a line for braving dark distances on foot.
Here is a line for space and classical amber bees.
And one for all the ones crossed-out.
I am only describing, as words are one way,
and walking is another.
So cross the street and step out for a walk,
one we will never take again. I am only describing something,
the way the finest grit becomes the sand we love.
And its warm color comes from whatever light there is,
even if there isn’t much at all.
And old John Cage doesn’t go away—new John Cages
just get added.
Past, present, future: our presence is requested.
And where is where? And XYZ is where too.

"Audition"

by Julia Alvarez

Porfirio drove Mami and me
to Cook's mountain village
to find a new pantry maid.
Cook had given Mami a tip
that her home town was girl-heavy,
the men lured away to the cities.
We drove to the interior,
climbing a steep, serpentine,
say-your-last-prayers road.
I leaned toward my mother
as if my weight could throw
the car's balance away
from the sheer drop below.
Late morning we entered
a dusty village of huts.
Mami rolled down her window
and queried an old woman,
Did she know of any girls
looking for work as maids?
Soon we were surrounded
by a dozen senoritas.
Under the thatched cantina
Mami conducted interviews--
a mix of personal questions
and Sphinx-like intelligence tests.
Do you have children, a novio?
Would you hit a child who hit you?
If I give you a quarter to buy
guineos at two for a nickel,
how many will you bring back?
As she interviewed I sat by,
looking the girls over;
one of them would soon
be telling me what to do,
reporting my misbehaviors.
Most seemed nice enough,
befriending me with smiles,
exclamations on my good hair,
my being such a darling.
Those were the ones I favored.
I'd fool them with sweet looks,
improve my bad reputation.
As we interviewed we heard
by the creek that flowed nearby
a high, clear voice singing
a plaintive lullaby...
as if the sunlight filling
the cups of the allamandas,
the turquoise sky dappled
with angel-feather clouds,
the creek trickling down
the emerald green of the mountain
had found a voice in her voice.
We listened. Mami's hard-line,
employer-to-be face
softened with quiet sweetness.
The voice came closer, louder--
a slender girl with a basket
of wrung rags on her head
passed by the cantina,
oblivious of our presence.
Who is she? my mother asked.
Gladys, the girls replied.
Gladys! my mother called
as she would for months to come.
Gladys, come clear the plates!
Gladys, answer the door!
Gladys! the young girl turned--
Abruptly, her singing stopped.

Ka'Ba

Amiri Baraka

"A closed window looks down
on a dirty courtyard, and Black people
call across or scream across or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will. 

Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air. 

We are beautiful people
With African imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with African eyes, and noses, and arms
tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun. 

We have been captured,
and we labor to make our getaway, into
the ancient image; into a new 

Correspondence with ourselves
and our Black family. We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy,and create. What will be 

the sacred word?

To Alexander Meiklejohn

John Beecher

I read your testimony and I thought
here is the man perfected that I knew
and reverenced next him who gave me life.
Too soon the long black limousine will stand
before your door and all unhearing you
will trundle off on casters while the winds
of elegiac oratory fill
the public prints and how the hearts will ache
of us who were your sons. Too late we'll carve
your stone. The time is now for rising up
and speaking out our love. Know then, dear man,
that mine has grown beyond the hero worship
of youth when your ideas broke the mould
of prejudice in which my mind was formed.
You let the world in on me, were the yeast
that set me boiling with desire to know
not merely but to do. I thought I loved
my country. You taught why America
deserved my love and all mankind's because
America was more than just a land;
it was the of all that men had won
against the ancient darkness. So believing
my life grew meaningful and where before
I felt myself an atom in the void
I now engaged to join with other men
to keep the light alive and specially
to oppose all those who in the name of light
would re-enthrone the darkness and betray
America.

This they have nearly done.
And I myself in prime of life have felt
the anguished bitterness that exiles know
cut off and cast away. How easy now
to curse America, cast in one's lot
with enemies, back one usurping gang
against the other! But for you I think
I would have made this all-too-human error.
Despised, rejected as I felt the thought
of you restrained me at the brink. "What would
he think? What would he do himself?" So clear
the answer always came. "Believe!" you said,
"Don't let them drive you to despair! Fight on!"

Women Don't Riot
(For N.B.S)
Ana Castillo

Women don't riot, not in maquilas in Malaysia, Mexico, or Korea,
not in sweatshops in New York or El Paso.
They don't revolt
in kitchens, laundries, or nurseries.
Not by the hundreds or thousands, changing
sheets in hotels or in laundries
when scalded by hot water,
not in restaurants where they clean and clean
and clean their hands raw.

Women don't riot, not sober and earnest,
or high and strung out, not of any color, 
any race, not the rich, poor,
or those in between. And mothers of all kinds 
especially don't run rampant through the streets.

In college those who've thought it out 
join hands in crucial times, carry signs,
are dragged away in protest.
We pass out petitions, organize a civilized vigil,
return to work the next day.

We women are sterilized, have more children
than they can feed,
don't speak the official language,
want things they see on TV,
would like to own a TV--
women who were molested as children
raped,
beaten,
harassed, which means
every last one sooner or later;
women who've defended themselves
and women who can't or don't know how
we don't--won't ever rise up in arms.

We don't storm through cities,
take over the press, make a unified statement,
once and for all: A third-millennium call--
from this day on no more, not me, not my daughter,
not her daughter either.

Women don't form a battalion, march arm in arm
across continents bound
by the same tongue, same food or lack thereof,
same God, same abandonment,
same broken heart,
raising children on our own, have
so much endless misery in common
that must stop
not for one woman or every woman,
but for the sake of us all.

Quietly, instead, one and each takes the offense, 
rejection, bureaucratic dismissal, disease
that should not have been, insult,
shove, blow to the head,
a knife at her throat.
She won't fight, she won't even scream--
taught as she's been
to be brought down as if by surprise.
She'll die like an ant beneath a passing heel.
Today it was her. Next time who.

--1998, Chicago

The Cat in the Kitchen
(For Donald Hall)

Robert Bly

Have you heard about the boy who walked by
The black water? I won't say much more.
Let's wait a few years. It wanted to be entered.
Sometimes a man walks by a pond, and a hand
Reaches out and pulls him in.

There was no
Intention, exactly. The pond was lonely, or needed
Calcium, bones would do. What happened then?

It was a little like the night wind, which is soft,
And moves slowly, sighing like an old woman
In her kitchen late at night, moving pans
About, lighting a fire, making some food for the cat.

Nocturne of the Wharves

Arna Bontemps

All night they whine upon their ropes and boom
against the dock with helpless prows:
these little ships that are too worn for sailing
front the wharf but do not rest at all.
Tugging at the dim gray wharf they think
no doubt of China and of bright Bombay,
and they remember islands of the East,
Formosa and the mountains of Japan.
They think of cities ruined by the sea
and they are restless, sleeping at the wharf.

Tugging at the dim gray wharf they think
no less of Africa. An east wind blows
and salt spray sweeps the unattended decks.
Shouts of dead men break upon the night.
The captain calls his crew and they respond--
the little ships are dreaming--land is near.
But mist comes up to dim the copper coast,
mist dissembles images of the trees.
The captain and his men alike are lost
and their shouts go down in the rising sound of waves.

Ah little ships, I know your weariness!
I know the sea-green shadows of your dream.
For I have loved the cities of the sea,
and desolations of the old days I
have loved: I was a wanderer like you
and I have broken down before the wind.

My Mother Enters the Work Force

Rita Dove

The path to ABC Business School
was paid for by a lucky sign:
Alterations, Qualified Seamstress Inquire Within.
Tested on Sleeves, hers
never puckered -- puffed or sleek,
Leg o' or Raglan --
they barely needed the damp cloth
to steam them perfect.

Those were the afternoons. Evenings
she took in piecework, the treadle machine
with its locomotive whir
traveling the lit path of the needle
through quicksand taffeta
or velvet deep as a forest.
And now and now sang the treadle,
I know, I know....

And then it was day again, all morning
at the office machines, their clack and chatter
another journey -- rougher,
that would go on forever
until she could break a hundred words
with no errors -- ah, and then

no more postponed groceries,
and that blue pair of shoes!

Frederick Douglass

Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.