You! Inez!

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

1875 –1935

Orange gleams athwart a crimson soulLambent flames; purple passion lurksIn your dusk eyes.

Red mouth; flower soft,

Your soul leaps up—and flashesStar-like, white, flame-hot.

Curving arms, encircling a world of love,You! Stirring the depths of passionate desire!

Unity

Pablo Neruda

1904 –1973

There is something dense, united, settled in the depths,

repeating its number, its identical sign.

How it is noted that stones have touched time,

in their refined matter there is an odor of age,

of water brought by the sea, from salt and sleep.

 

I’m encircled by a single thing, a single movement: 

a mineral weight, a honeyed light

cling to the sound of the word “noche”:

the tint of wheat, of ivory, of tears,

things of leather, of wood, of wool,

archaic, faded, uniform,

collect around me like walls.

I work quietly, wheeling over myself,

a crow over death, a crow in mourning.

I mediate, isolated in the spread of seasons,

centric, encircled by a silent geometry:

a partial temperature drifts down from the sky,

a distant empire of confused unities

reunites encircling me.

For My People

Margaret Walker

1915 –1998

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs     repeatedly: 

their dirges and their ditties and their blues      and jubilees, 

praying their prayers nightly to an     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an     unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years,

 to the     gone years and the now years and the maybe years,    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending    hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching    dragging along never gaining never reaping never    knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama    backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor    and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking    and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss    Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn     to know the reasons why and the answers to and the    people who and the places where and the days when, in    memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we    were black and poor and small and different and nobody    cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to    be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and    play and drink their wine and religion and success, to    marry their playmates and bear children and then die    of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox    Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New    Orleans,

lost disinherited dispossessed and happy    people filling the cabarets and taverns and other    people’s pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and    land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time     being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when     burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled     and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures     who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in     the dark of churches and schools and clubs and     societies, associations and councils and committees and      conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and     devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,     

preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by     false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,    

trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,    

all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless    

generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. 

Let a    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now     rise and take control.

Nothing Twice

Wisława Szymborska

1923 –2012

Nothing can ever happen twice.

In consequence, the sorry fact is

that we arrive here improvised

and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,

if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,

you can’t repeat the class in summer:

this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,no two nights will teach what bliss is

in precisely the same way,

with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tonguementions your name by accident:

I feel as if a rose were flunginto the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you’re here with me,I can’t help looking at the clock:

A rose? A rose? 

What could that be?

Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day

with so much needless fear and sorrow?

It’s in its nature not to stay:

Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer

to seek accord beneath our star,

although we’re different (we concur)just as two drops of water are.

America

Walt Whitman

1819 –1892

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,

All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,

Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

The Dead Layer

Arielle Hebert

Ten years after Florida and I can still remember that girl,

burning in alchemical fire, 

joy hungry. She never dreamedshe’d outlive leaving home. But here I am.

In oil painting, you must first paint the dead layer.

Unseen foundations, lumps and scrapes for depth and texture.

And I took such care with my dead layer, thoughtI’d live my whole life there. 

But it’s been ten years.

My winter skin has lost its tolerance for sun.

Visiting home is a training exercise in breathing underwater,

and I was never the strongest swimmer. 

Meanwhile, I’ve met mountains. Seasons. 

True hearts.

I curve the palette knife loaded with paint, layer after layer.

For pines and hemlocks, for diving into the Eno quarry sinkholeand floating down the Haw River with my love.

For October’s pumpkin patches and February’s daffodils.

Summer’s green veiling our nearest neighbor.

Now I know. The chroma, the brilliance.

None of it could have happened without rowing in the channelunder the one-lane bridge at Blackburn Point, without Banyan treesor hibiscus flowers, without those early parties on 39th Streetand the fights at Bayshore, without chain smoking griefaway in the side yard, and loving people at the wrong time,without sunburns and oranges, all the blue hours,low tides, crushed white moonshells underneath.

Hurricane Blues

Arielle Hebert

People couldn’t help but give them names,

to tell one from another.Some seasons exhaust the alphabetnaming violences.

Six months of repeated beatings,lightning strikes and heat waves.

One hurricane can alter a coastline, a life.

Ours is a culture of disaster.Entire families board up the windowsthen go surfing. Sandbag the foundationthen jetski the drowned streets.

Kids get out kites and canoes.Even if there’s no powerand the bottled water’s running out.

This is how we grew up, taking paradisetides one day at a time, holding handsat three funerals my senior year alone.

We tossed in our handful of dirt.

We hugged the mothers of the dead.

After parties became hereafter parties.

We danced in our funeral clothes,

kept late night vigils,

post-apocalyptic parties,under-the-sea parties,

no-tomorrow parties.

We treaded grief like water,

missed hurricanes in the off season,

when chaos ebbed enoughfor us to see clearly, all the damage.