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...
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
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...
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...
We thought the birds were singing louder. We were almost certain they were. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screens or in the backyard with our podfolk. Dang, you hear those birds? Don’t they sound loud?...