Tag Archives: birth

Childhood…if you’re Black, Nikki Giovanni #poem #BlackLivesMatter

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Nikki-Rosa by Nikki Giovanni

childhood remembrances are always a drag
if you’re Black
you always remember things like living in Woodlawn  
with no inside toilet
and if you become famous or something
they never talk about how happy you were to have
your mother
all to yourself and
how good the water felt when you got your bath
from one of those
big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in
and somehow when you talk about home
it never gets across how much you
understood their feelings
as the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale
and even though you remember
your biographers never understand
your father’s pain as he sells his stock
and another dream goes
And though you’re poor it isn’t poverty that
concerns you
and though they fought a lot
it isn’t your father’s drinking that makes any difference
but only that everybody is together and you
and your sister have happy birthdays and very good
Christmases
and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy

Black History Month. From Arnold Rampersad, the Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry.

Isabel Allende- poetic words. “Each person is a master of his silence.”

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“Barrabas came to us by the sea.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“They were dressed in black, silent, and dry-eyed, as befits the norms of sadness in a country accustomed to the dignity of grief”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“My name is Eva, which means ‘life,’ according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory.”
― Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

“There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,’ my mother explained shortly before she left me. ‘If you can remember me, I will be with you always.”
― Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

“The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.”
― Isabel Allende

“Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.”
― Isabel Allende, Paula

“I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before.”
― Isabel Allende, Paula

“My death..I mean..will it be quick,and with dignity? How will i know when the end is coming?”
“When you vomit blood,sir,” Tao Chi’en said sadly.
That happened three weeks later,in the middle of Pacific, in the privacy of the captain’s cabin. As soon as he could stand , the old seaman cleaned up the traces of his vomit, rinsed out his mouth , changed his bloody shirt, lighted his pipe, and went to the bow of his ship , where he stood and looked for the last time at the stars winking in a sky of black velvet. Several sailors saw him and waited at a distance, caps in hands. When he had smoked the last of his tobacco, Captain John Sommers put his legs over the rail and noiselessly dropped into the sea.
― Isabel Allende, Portrait in Sepia

“People do not belong to others, either. How can the huincas buy and sell people if they do not own them. Sometimes the boy went two or three days without speaking a word, surly, and not eating, and when asked what was the matter, the answer was always the same: “There are content days and there are sad days. Each person is a master of his silence.”
― Isabel Allende, Inés of My Soul

Black History Month: Now That I Am Forever with Child by Audre Lorde

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Now That I Am Forever with Child
by Audre Lorde

How the days went
while you were blooming within me
I remember____each upon each
the swelling changed planes of my body

and how you first fluttered____then jumped
and I thought it was my heart.

How the days wound down
and the turning of winter
I recall____you
growing heavy
against the wind.
I thought____now her hands
are formed____her hair
has started to curl
now her teeth are done
now she sneezes.

Then the seed opened.
I bore you one morning
just before spring
my head rang like a fiery piston
my legs were towers between which
a new world was passing.

Since then
I can only distinguish
one thread within running hours
you____flowing through selves
toward You.