Explore Poems: Optimism

At last I’m taking off this coat,
      this black coat of a country
      that I swore for years was mine,
      that I wore more out of habit
      than design.
      Born...

Take all summer,
your ember from the sun,
its walking meditation. Store it in small
vaults of light to …

Un club nocturno no hace un verano
Mas creo en el perreo
Eterno recreo
En la agitación de la masa crítica…

A nightclub doesn’t make a summer
I believe more in perreo
Play everlasting
In the agitation of a critical…

As a quiet little seedling
    Lay within its darksome bed,
To itself it fell a-talking,
    And this is what…

I saw new Worlds beneath the Water ly,
New Peeple; yea, another Sky
And Sun, which seen by Day
Might things…

Now by what whim of wanton chance
Do radiant eyes know sombre days?
And feet that shod in light should…

The feel of a much needed hug in a moment of sorrow
An unexpected helping hand from the stranger
The curl of the tiniest of fingers wrapped trustingly around your own
A gentle breeze on the cusp of Autumn
And the way a leaf...

Let’s try this:
If you’re dead, blink twice
I promise the second time will be incredible

Hagamos algo:
Si estás muerto parpadea 2 veces
Te prometo que la segunda vez será increíble

Love is boring and passé, all that old baggage,
the bloody bric-a-brac, the bad, the gothic,
retrograde, obscurantist hum and drum of it
needs to be swept away. So, night after night,
we sit in the dark of the Roxy beside grandmothers
with their shanks...

In this life, there are stars
and there are stunt doubles.

Before I became one of those fathers
obsessed with memorizing his lines,
making peace with the Big Director
in the sky who doesn’t like ad libs,
before all that, I was the star
of my own...

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

Even the grocery list is a love poem, a prayer—
God, let me keep what I love.

Peaches, cheap. Books, brilliant—
mine so I can underline.

How aromatic the apricots,
how sharp the novels.

Together,
we have planted an orchard.

I don’t understand the word defensive:
are you supposed...

Darkness chained me to my tattered reed mat;
The head of tyranny sprinkled
The soot of ignorance in my eyes, and sleep
Hammered my head with slogans,
Then a nightmare stumbled on my sprawled life,
Tripped on the alarm of my heart,
And set me singing...

For weeks we’ve seen some wild winds.
Today, I find my hives knocked over.
A season’s honey smeared in rivers
on the ground. I stand their domes again.

The bees are swarming in the trees and fighting
against the gale. I watch one entire colony
trapped...

This morning I salute
the weevil, who ruins
the most precious grain.

I reserve my compliments
for the sober larva that does not rest
even in the most crystalline waters.

And spare no applause
for the silverfish, taking their time
in books, without ever learning the Latin for...

Black woman joy is like this:
Mama said one day long before I was born
she was walking down the street,
foxes around her neck, their little heads
smiling up at her and out at the world
and she was wearing this suit she had...