Category Archives: Women’s poetry

“i paid my 30 cents and rode by the bus window all the way down…” Nikki Giovanni #BlackHistoryMonth #ValentinesDay

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nikki-giovanni
Photo by:

by Nikki Giovanni

i paid my 30 cents and rode by the bus
window all the way down

i felt a little funny with no hair
on my head
but my knees were shiny ’cause
aunty mai belle cleaned me up
and i got off on time and walked
past the lions and the guard straight
up to the desk and said
“dr. doo little steroscope please”
and this really old woman said
“Do You Have A Library Card?”
and i said
“i live here up the street”
and she said
“Do You Have A LIBRARY Card?”
and i said
“this is the only place i can use
the steroscope for
dr. doo little miss washington
brought us here this spring
to see it.”
and another lady said
“GIVE THAT BOY WHAT HE WANT. HE WANT TO LEAD THE RACE”
and i said
“no ma’am i want to see dr. dooolittle”
and she said “same thang son same thang”

.

.

From: My Black Me: A Beginning Book of Black Poetry (A Puffin Poetry Book)
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com My Black Me: A Beginning Book of Black Poetry 
NEW at independent bookstores NEAR you: My Black Me

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“I Have a Dream” Pat Parker. “i can walk the streets/holding hands with my lover” #valentines #blackhistorymonth

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I Have a Dream

i have a dream
.    no—
.    not Martin’s
though my feet moved
.    down many paths.
it’s a simple dream—

i have a dream
.     not the dream of the vanguard
.     not to turn this world—
.         all over
not the dream of the masses—
.     not the dream of women
.     not to turn this world
.         all
.            over
it’s a simple dream—

In my dream
.     i can walk the streets
.         holding hands with my lover

In my dream—
.     i can go to a hamburger stand
.          & not be taunted by bikers on a holiday.

In my dream—
.     i can go to a public bathroom,
.          & not be shrieked at by ladies—

In my dream—
.     i can walk ghetto streets
.          & not be beaten up by my brothers.

In my dream—
.     i can walk out of a bar
.          & not be arrested by the pigs

I’ve placed this body
.     placed this mind
.     in lots of dreams—
.     in Martin’s and Malcolm’s—
.     in Huey’s & Mao’s—
.     in George’s & Angela’s—
.     in the north & south
.         of Vietnam & America
.                & Africa

i’ve placed this body & mind.
.     in dreams—
.     dreams of people—

.     now i’m tired—
.     now you listen!
.          i have a dream too.
.          it’s a simple dream.

Pat Parker

More black poets to read through this link.

More about Pat Parker at the University of Minnesota’s Voices From the Gaps
Women Writers and Artists of Color.

From: The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry.
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
NEW at independent bookstores: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780195125634

Established in 1970, Glad Day Bookshop is the world’s oldest LGBTQ bookstore and Toronto’s oldest surviving bookstore. In 2012, a group of 23 community members pooled their funds and bought Glad Day Bookshop to save it from closing.

“Our best strategy for survival is adding new revenues streams like food and drink – which means a larger space.
We’ve picked out a great spot on Church Street that would allow us to be a bookstore & coffee shop during the day and a bar at night.
It is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible washroom.

It has a cute patio, a small space for performances and walls for art.

We will be a space where everyone feels welcome, sexy and celebrated.

We will be a queer-owned, indie place on Church Street. We will amplify the love, creativity, sexuality, diversity & liberation that Glad Day Bookshop is known for.”

Black poets and #blackhistorymonth: links to poems and poetry books! #blackvoicesmatter #blacklivesmatter

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Link to 2014 Black History Month poems is here.

Link to all the poems on this blog by black poets is this one!

There is SO much great, fun, exciting, beautiful poetry by black poets that reading them on screen can be overwhelming.

So… you can ORDER these books and have a look at them every now and again at home, maybe on the tube, subway, bus, waiting for the bus 🙂

1. The Fire People: Collection of Contemporary Black British Poets
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Fire People

2. The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry.
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
NEW at independent bookstores: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780195125634

3. “Caroling Dusk: an Anthology of Verse by Black Poets.” Edited by Countee Cullen.
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com Caroling Dusk
NEW at independent bookstores NEAR you: Caroling Dusk

4. African-American Poetry: An Anthology, 1773-1927
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com African-American Poetry: an Anthology 
NEW at independent bookstores NEAR you: African-American Poetry: An Anthology, 1773-1927

For CHILDREN:

5. My Black Me: A Beginning Book of Black Poetry (A Puffin Poetry Book)
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com My Black Me: A Beginning Book of Black Poetry 
NEW at independent bookstores NEAR you: My Black Me

Words, Wide Night by Carol Ann Duffy. When whom youlovelivesfar away. #valentines #poetryisjustawesome

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Words, Wide Night by Carol Ann Duffy
.
Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with youand this is what it is like or what it is like in words..
.
.Grand to hear that Duffy is first Lesbian Poet Laureate!From: Poems on the Underground, edited by Chernaik, Herbert and Benson.
Buy NEW and USED at abebooks: Poems on the Underground!!!From another poetry blog comment: a reference to George Gerwshwin:

Blah blah blah blah moon
Blah blah blah above
Blah blah blah blah croon
Blah blah blah above.

Tra la la la, tra la la la, la, merry month of May
Tra la la la, tra la la la, la, ‘neath a cloud of grey.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah your hair
Blah blah blah your eyes
Blah blah blah blah care
Bla blah blah blah skies.

Tra la la la, tra la la la, la, cottage for two
Blah blah blah blah blah blah darling with you.

Blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah…

 

 

Established in 1970, Glad Day Bookshop is the world’s oldest LGBTQ bookstore and Toronto’s oldest surviving bookstore. In 2012, a group of 23 community members pooled their funds and bought Glad Day Bookshop to save it from closing.

“Our best strategy for survival is adding new revenues streams like food and drink – which means a larger space.
We’ve picked out a great spot on Church Street that would allow us to be a bookstore & coffee shop during the day and a bar at night.
It is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible washroom.

It has a cute patio, a small space for performances and walls for art.

We will be a space where everyone feels welcome, sexy and celebrated.

We will be a queer-owned, indie place on Church Street. We will amplify the love, creativity, sexuality, diversity & liberation that Glad Day Bookshop is known for.”

Out of longing, Dvorah Fogel- Yiddish poetry! “…Every night something should happen in the world…”

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Favourite stanza because the thought:

Every night something should happen in the world.
Something should come
of all the walks
One takes in a day.

 

Out of longing

Today I bought yellow cherries
smelling wetly of loneliness.

Cherries never grow old.
Just sixteen, seventeen years old.

Today I’m a yellow cherry,
I taste emptily of drifting
through night streets, city streets.
Yellow lamps.

Every night something should happen in the world.
Something should come
of all the walks
One takes in a day.

But last year
and again two and three years ago

Only the watery taste
of loneliness.

Dvorah Fogel.

 

From: a Treasury of Yiddish Poetry edited by Irving Howe and Liezer Greenberg.
USED and NEW: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=13535919967

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/fogel-dvoyre

“Together with her husband and son, Fogel was killed in the Lwów ghetto in 1942.
…
Fogel’s remarkable experimental poetry, all written in the 1930s, was, in the spirit of early twentieth-century art, radically avant-garde and attuned to all the modernist minimalisms.

She attempted to fuse modern art and poetry in a new style that she termed “white words,” striving, as she put it, to create a new lyric poetry of the urban condition: a poetry of cool stasis and of geometric ornamentation with a rhythm of repetition that can replace melodiousness and dynamism, in which monotone becomes theme.

In her creative prose she employed repetitive detached impressions (“montages”) to achieve the same goals.

Contemporaneous and later critics considered her style too intellectual, studied and obscure, and lacking in traditional Jewish and feminine thematics.

Yet Fogel herself regarded her project not as a deliberate experiment, but rather as “a necessity, achieved and paid for with life’s experience.”

Everything Will Remember, Rajzel Zychlinska. #Yiddishpoetry … The ships will be the color/Of my clothing

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Everything will remember

Everything will remember
That I was here.
The ships will be the color
Of my clothing.
The birds will use my voice for singing,
The fisherman on the rock
Will ponder my poem,
The river
Will follow my footprints.

.
By Rajzel Zychlinska.

 

Read more about her at the  Jewish Women’s archives: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/zychlinski-rajzel

Thanks to Wiki: “Rajzel Żychlińsky was a Polish writer of poetry in Yiddish whose poetry covered a span from the pre–World War II depression years in Poland to the terrors and tragedies of the Holocaust. She is especially noted for her poem God Hid His Face.”

From: a Treasury of Yiddish Poetry edited by Irving Howe and Liezer Greenberg.
USED and NEW: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=13535919967

Cavalry Way and After Reading Mickey In The Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed.

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Because The Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry is one of the best, most satisfying, fat books of poetry I have, you should go buy it too. Poets get paid and editors get paid and we get more poesie. This leads to joy.

NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
NEW at independent bookstores: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780195125634

One sad, one happy poem.

Calvary Way

How did you feel, Mary,
Womb heavy with Christ Child,
Tasting the dust of uncertain journey?
Were you afraid?
When, winding the swaddling clothes,
You laid him in the manger,
Were you afraid?
Could you trace nail holes
Under his curling fingers,
Thorn pricks on the forehead?
Could you trace them?

I should bear a warm brown baby,
A new dark world of wonder;
But I fear the nails that pierce the spirit,
The unseen crosses.
How did you feel, Mary,
On the road beyond the star-lit manger,
Up to the hill to crucifixion?
Were you afraid?

May Miller

A graduate of Howard University; did graduate work at Columbia. Teacher of Speech and Dramatics in Baltimore schools.

 

After Reading Mickey In The Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed 
Rita Dove

I’m the milk and the milk’s in me!… I’m Mickey!

My daughter spreads her legs
to find her vagina:
hairless, this mistaken
bit of nomenclature
is what a stranger cannot touch
without her yelling. She demands
to see mine and momentarily
we’re a lopsided star
among the spilled toys,
my prodigious scallops
exposed to her neat cameo.

And yet the same glazed
tunnel, layered sequences.
She is three; that makes this
innocent. We’re pink! 
she shrieks, and bounds off.

Every month she wants
to know where it hurts
and what the wrinkled string means
between my legs. This is good blood
I say, but that’s wrong, too.
How to tell her that it’s what makes us —
black mother, cream child.
That we’re in the pink
and the pink’s in us.

.

Thank you Wiki: From 1993 to 1995 she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American Poet Laureate. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1987). 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.

The documentary film Rita Dove: An American Poet by Argentinean-American filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley premiered at the Paramount Theater (Charlottesville, Virginia) on January 31, 2014.

The annual “Rita Dove Poetry Award” was established by Salem College Center for Women Writers in 2004.

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harriet by Lucille Clifton. (Harriet Tubman)

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harriet
if i be you
let me not forget
to be the pistol
pointed
to be the madwoman
at the rivers edge
warning
be free or die
and isabell
if i be you
let me in my
sojourning
not forget
to ask my brothers
ain’t i a woman too
and
grandmother
if i be you
let me not forget
to work hard
trust the Gods
love my children and
wait.

.

Lucille Clifton .
.
Isabella Baumfree was the slave name of free woman Sojourner Truth. More thoughts about the poem here.

.

Connotations to “wait”: psalms, patience, Walt Witman’s Song of Myself that ends with “wait” and that Clifton refers to elsewhere and white people telling black folks to “go slow” and wait for more civil rights as sung in Mississippi Goddam by Nina Simone.
.

“… You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

.

Walt Whitman.

.
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NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry NEW at independent bookstores: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780195125634

The Black Unicorn, Audre Lorde.

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Migraine morning, so no reading law but reading poetry.

The Black Unicorn

The black unicorn is greedy.
The black unicorn is impatient.
The black unicorn was mistaken
for a shadow or symbol
and taken
through a cold country
where mist painted mockeries
of my fury.
It is not on her lap where the horn rests
but deep in her moonpit
growing.
The black unicorn is restless
the black unicorn is unrelenting
the black unicorn is not
free.

NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
NEW at independent bookstores: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780195125634

The Black Unicorn isn’t supposed to be funny, but she makes me smile. I’m not sure: I think the mist means that a token black person is white washed by white friends or fellow academics, writers maybe, a place where she feels bound also by misogyny and emphasizes her power comes from her vag. That’s what I read into it. The black unicorn is powerful.

Quick notes about the poem.

Rosa Gutman Jasny: The Faraway Moon. Yiddish poetry!

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Because sometimes you can’t get a woman out of your mind. Not even by watching Buffy. Or The Good Wife. This poem especially the last line, shows so much tenderness and knowing…

Rosa Gutman Jasny “produced much of their work in Eastern Europe […] also found their way to New York at various stages in their lives. The lives of several women writers were spent in a perpetual state of wandering…”
http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/yiddish-womens-poetry

The Faraway Moon

The faraway moon, has she already heard
That any minute now
She’s to become a world by herself?
No longer lotus flower, tender and bemused —
Just an ordinary drab world.

Today she shows us half her face,
drawn and pale.
That blond capricious moon —
What might she not do from rage?

Turn swiftly to her lords on high,
And scatter all dreams since time began,
Like dust into outer space?

Oh no, moon, don’t.

.

Poem by Rosa Gutman Jasny and translated from Yiddish to English by Etta Blum.

Treasury of Yiddish Poetry. Edited by Irving Howe, Eliezer Greenberg.

USED and NEW: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=13535919967

Australian (Aboriginal) Poetry 2: Judith Rodriguez, Nigel Roberts!

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After / the Moratorium Reading

.         the marie antoinette / slice
.                   of cake / was
.       awarded to
.                              who ever said
.            after this reading / let’s
. get it on / at Michael’s place / I heard
.                                       that guy
.       from Canberra’s got
.                   some farout
.                   vietnamese
.                        shit.

Nigel Roberts (re: Michael Wilding)

Eskimo Occasion

I am in my Eskimo-hunting-song mood,
Aha!
The lawn is tundra    the car will not start
The sunlight is an avalanche     we are avalanche-struck at our
.    breakfast
struck with sunlight through grass    me and my spoonfed daughters
out of this world in our kitchen

I will sing the song of my daughter-hunting,
Oho!
The waves lay down     the ice grew strong
I sang the song      of dark water under ice
the song of the winter fishing     the magic for seal rising
among the ancestor-masks.

I waited by water to dream new spirits,
Hoo!
The water spoke     the ice shouted
the sea opened      the sun made young shadows
they breathed my breathing       I took them from deep water
I brought them fur-warmed home.

I am dancing the year of the two great hunts,
Ya-hay!
It was I who waited       cold in the wind-break
I stamp like the bear       I call like the wind of the thaw
I leap like the sea spring-running.         My sunstruck daughters
.      splutter
and chuckle and bang their spoons:

Mummy is singing at breakfast and dancing!
So big!

Judith Rodriguez

From: The New Oxford Book of Australian Poetry

Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn B. Bennett and Gladys May Casely Hayford: poems for #BlackOutFriday

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‪#‎BlackOutFriday‬ poems.

Dream variation

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While dark night comes on gently,
…Dark like me,—
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! whirl! whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening. …
A talk, slim tree. …
Night coming tenderly
… Black like me.

Langston Hughes.

1955536

Photo: New York public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Hatred

I shall hate you
Like a dart of singing steel
Shot through still air
At even-tide,
Or solemnly
As pines are sober
When they stand etched
Against the sky.
Hating you shall be a game
Played with cool hands
And slim fingers.
Your heart will yearn
For the lonely splendor
Of the pine tree
While rekindled fires
In my eyes
Shall wound you like swift arrows.
Memory will lay its hands
Upon your breast
And you will understand
My hatred.

Gwendolyn B. Bennett

 

laluah

Baby Cobina

Brown Baby Cobina, with his large black velvet eyes,
His little coos of ecstacies, his gurgling of surprise,
With brass bells on his ankles, that laugh where’er he goes,
It’s so rare for bells to tinkle, above brown dimpled toes.

Brown Baby Cobina is so precious that we fear
Something might come and steal him, when we grown-ups are not near;
So we tied bells on his ankles, and kissed on them this charm —
” Bells, guard our Baby Cobina from all devils and all harm. ”

Gladys May Casely Hayford (Aquah LaLuah)

From: “Caroling Dusk: an Anthology of Verse by Black Poets.” Edited by Countee Cullen.

NEW and USED: Abebooks.com Caroling Dusk
NEW at independent bookstores NEAR you: Caroling Dusk

Other reading:

Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Mariah L. Richardson: Butter Cream. Lesbian love and sex.

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Web_Richardson

Photographer unknown.

Girl on Girl touching. A poem. Most definitely FTW.

Mariah L. Richardson
Butter Cream

She walks
like soft cake
butter sweet
and light

my appetite whet

the day
cold
snow

I was seeking
her spring whirrs
hums like the land
black and wet

inside her sanctuary
I stand stare
nervous windows sweat
to spite the cold
blackened trees
bare branches
etching
the grey, grey sky

I dream of
curling curving
into a cadence
take her in until
we occupy
the same place
the same space

caressing her
I touch myself

I feel delicious

rose chiffon light
echoes off my skin

brushing close
she says through
Cheshire grin
“if I like it,
I lick it.”

bouquet of
myrrh sandalwood
wafts and billows

faux ming vase
bursting of cattails
and pussy willow
tease in the corner

atop
the big, big bed
royal purple
gold sheets
satin raw silk
gregorian chants
whisper lusty devotions
my mouth goes dry
my eyes wide
damp palms grasp
headboard slats
for hands to hold

“breathe”
she says as
she parts me
“breathe”

her breath warms
I am made soft
wanting wanting
dancing on my skin
I stretch/contract
clutch pillow
to the place
she tastes me
I hear the color red
feel golden and sun
piercing through
eyes sliding back
fluttering behind
closed lids

“open your eyes

see,”
she sighs

I ride and ride
surrender deep
into eyes reflecting
rain and fire and all
that is song

I ride and ride
her breath
my breath
my breath
I try to catch
in earth cracks
and breaks
lava spews and
monsoons and cave- ins
and rapture
revelations
jesus
coming
coming

outside a pewter sky
flocked by crows
mirror our black bodies
rising

 

images

‪#‎BlackVoicesMatter‬
‪#‎BlackPoetsFTW‬

http://www.stlamerican.com/entertainment/living_it/article_a4fd871c-60e0-11e0-86b6-001cc4c03286.html

 

http://www.uppityco.com/sticksandstones.html

 

Mariah L. Richardson is a native of St. Louis. She received her BA in Communications from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from Smith College in Playwriting. Mariah began her acting career while in New Mexico. Afterwards, she returned to St. Louis and did two seasons with the St. Louis Black Repertory and three seasons with Metro Theater Company. Her HBO/New Writers Project solo performance show, all that… has toured throughout the country. Her play, Sistahs Indeed! was a main stage production at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park in 2008. In 2007, Metro Theater Company commissioned her to write Delilah’s Wish which won a Kevin Kline Award in 2011 and was published by Dramatic Publishing. Mariah is a budding filmmaker with several films under her belt. Her first short film 5 of Cups, premiered in The Center’s Film Festival in New York in 2004. Her third film, Beautiful Hands made the rounds in film festivals, being screened by Chicks with Flicks in New York City and The St. Louis International Film Festival Fall 2006. Her latest short, Lies We Tell Ourselves, was screened in the 2011 St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase and was in the St. Louis International Film Festival in November 2011. As well as actor and filmmaker, Mariah is also an accomplished poet having her work published in many anthologies and magazines such as Essence, Sinister Wisdom, and Harbinger as well as her own chapbook titled, Stronger Than My Fears.  She is an adjunct professor for St. Louis Community College at Forest Park. She has taught in after school programs, residences and homeless shelters from Los Angeles to New England. Mariah’s goal is to combine all the things she loves; poetry, performance, film, and music together to create work which inspires others to tell their own stories and to radiate the Creator Spirit within.

Established in 1970, Glad Day Bookshop is the world’s oldest LGBTQ bookstore and Toronto’s oldest surviving bookstore. In 2012, a group of 23 community members pooled their funds and bought Glad Day Bookshop to save it from closing.

“Our best strategy for survival is adding new revenues streams like food and drink – which means a larger space.
We’ve picked out a great spot on Church Street that would allow us to be a bookstore & coffee shop during the day and a bar at night.
It is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible washroom.

It has a cute patio, a small space for performances and walls for art.

We will be a space where everyone feels welcome, sexy and celebrated.

We will be a queer-owned, indie place on Church Street. We will amplify the love, creativity, sexuality, diversity & liberation that Glad Day Bookshop is known for.”

Camomile Tea: Katherine Mansfield!

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katherine_mansfield NPG P1009; Katherine Mansfield by John Herbert Folker

(l) Katherine Mansfield, Menton, France. 1921. Ref: PAColl-6826-1-15-1. Source: Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand Website: http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23146336

(r) Katherine Mansfield, by John Herbert Folker, 1917 – NPG P1009 – © National Portrait Gallery

Outside the sky is light with stars; 
There's a hollow roaring from the sea.
 
And, alas! for the little almond flowers, 
The wind is shaking the almond tree.
 

How little I thought, a year ago, 
In the horrible cottage upon the Lee 
That he and I should be sitting so 
And sipping a cup of camomile tea.
 

Light as feathers the witches fly, 
The horn of the moon is plain to see; 
By a firefly under a jonquil flower 
A goblin toasts a bumble-bee.
 

We might be fifty, we might be five, 
So snug, so compact, so wise are we! 
Under the kitchen-table leg 
My knee is pressing against his knee.
 

Our shutters are shut, the fire is low, 
The tap is dripping peacefully; 
The saucepan shadows on the wall 
Are black and round and plain to see.