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
Richard Wright: Haiku
I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.
Vox Populi 