Alice Dunbar-Nelson: Sonnet
I had no thought of violets of late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days, when lovers mate
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Religion
I am no priest of crooks nor creeds,
For human wants and human needs
Are more to me than prophets’ deeds
Toi Derricotte | Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing
My mother was not impressed with her beauty;
once a year she put it on like a costume
Clarissa Scott Delany: Joy
Joy shakes me like the wind that lifts a sail…
Jericho Brown: Nativity
Come trouble’s birthday,
I think of every gift people get
They don’t use. Oh, and I
Pray.
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
Paul Laurence Dunbar: In Summer Time
‘Tis wealth enough of joy for me
In summer time to simply be.
Chard deNiord: “We Will Not Give Up on Each Other”: A Conversation with Major Jackson
We are living in an age of absurdity, but I am casting for wider seas.
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.
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Sympathy
I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling…
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.
Amiri Baraka: The Liar
What I thought was love
in me, I find a thousand instances
of fear.
Thomas Sayers Ellis: Godzilla’s Avocado
An artichoke’s heart does not pump ketchup.
It pumps pesto,
oily, olive clots of guacamole.
Sheila Carter-Jones: Running into a high school classmate years after
I was the only, back then Negro, girl
in a class of four hundred waves splashing,
tossing me about in the crash
