Video: Lucille Clifton reads “won’t you celebrate with me”
won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life?
Paul Laurence Dunbar: We Wear the Mask
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
Claude McKay: The Lynching
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue
Claude McKay: December, 1919
‘Tis ten years since you died, mother,
Just ten dark years of pain,
And oh, I only wish that I
Could weep just once again.
Clarissa Scott Delany: Joy
Joy shakes me like the wind that lifts a sail…
Myisha Cherry: From the erotic to the political – the legacy of Audre Lorde
The feminist poet and scholar Audre Lorde left a legacy that my generation, women, people of colour and members of the LGBTQ community have widely and wisely embraced. And we still … Continue reading
Video: My God, It’s Full of Stars | Tracy K. Smith
This short film adapts a poem by the former US Poet Laureate Tracy K Smith, whose father worked on the Hubble as one of NASA’s first Black engineers, with meticulously crafted visuals from the Brazilian animation director Daniel Brunson to create a wondrous ode to our desire to know the Universe.
Jericho Brown: Nativity
Come trouble’s birthday,
I think of every gift people get
They don’t use. Oh, and I
Pray.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: In the Other World
Our beloved lay down and then eloped
to that other world.
Countee Cullen: Heritage
Africa? A book one thumbs
Listlessly, till slumber comes.
Unremembered are her bats
Circling through the night, her cats
Crouching in the river reeds
Video: Joe Biden and Elizabeth Alexander discuss “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden
President-elect Joe Biden, poet Elizabeth Alexander, psychologist Angela Duckworth, and a chorus of working fathers and sons join Poetry in America host Elisa New to reflect on Robert Hayden’s sonnet “Those Winter Sundays.”
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Bury Me in a Free Land
All that my yearning spirit craves,
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.
Video: Revolution
Revolution is comprised of 7 vignettes where individuals talk, discuss how being Black has impacted them and what the word revolution means to them.
Amiri Baraka: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.
