I couldn’t believe it: but what I mean by that is that I couldn’t find any room for it anywhere inside me. I had kept it outside me for a long time. I hadn’t wanted to know. — James Baldwin, from “Sonny’s Blues” (1957), Going to Meet the Man. (Vintage; Reissue edition, April 25, 1995)… Continue reading James Baldwin
If we run fast enough, the winds will not catch us. — Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins, from preface to “Coal,” in her mother’s collectionThe Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. (W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition, February 17, 2000)
Her Lips Are Copper Wire whisper of yellow globes gleaming on lamp-posts that sway like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog and let your breath be moist against me like bright beads on yellow globes telephone the power-house that the main wires are insulate (her words play softly up and down dewy corridors of billboards)… Continue reading Jean Toomer
I would liken you To a night without stars Were it not for your eyes. I would liken you To a sleep without dreams Were it not for your songs. — Langston Hughes, “Quiet Girl,” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (First Vintage Classic, 1995)
Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time. ― Maya Angelou
I am the sun and moon and forever hungry the sharpened edge where day and night shall meet and not be one. — Audre Lorde, from “From the House of Yemanjá,” The Black Unicorn: Poems. (W. W. Norton & Company; Reissue edition, August 17, 1995) Originally published 1978.
Across the field white boxes of honeybees silent as dirt, silent as your missent postcards. — Yusef Komunyakaa, from “The Way the Cards Fall,” Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1993)
