According to the Huffington Post, there will be a memorial celebration for her on May 4 (6 p.m. , at the eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave., Chicago), during which poets will read her work, and I hope to attend it.
*Though one obituary lists her age as 69, this site lists her birth year as 1945.
In honor and memory of her, I'm posting one of her poems below. Like so many of her poems, it focuses on the lives and experiences of black women, speaking directly about and to them. As the poem suggests, the pressures on black women are tremendous, and one of the results is a refrain of the poem, "we are lonely"; this isn't news, but Rodgers' skill endows it with power and beauty, undercutting the pain with sly humor and a cold recognition that one answer to this plight is acknowledge of the pain, of the stresses and struggles, the coping behavior and its results--one answer is knowledge, and recognition, that this is what so many black women go through, and it's that knowledge that Rodgers's work so often imparts, in its distinctive way. And so:
Poem for Some Black Women
i am lonely,
all the people i know
i know too well
there was comfort in that
at first but now
we know each others miseries
too well.
we are
lonely women, who spend time waiting for
occasional flings
we live with fear.
we are lonely.
we are talented, dedicated, well read
BLACK, COMMITTED,
we are lonely,
we understand the world problems
Black women’s problems with Black men
but all
we really understand is
lonely.
when we laugh,
we are so happy to laugh
we cry when we laugh
we are lonely.
we are busy people
always doing things
fearing getting trapped in rooms
loud with empty…
yet
knowing the music of silence/hating it/hoarding it
loving it/treasuring it,
it often birthing our creativity
we are lonely
being soft and being hard
supporting our selves, earning our own bread
soft/hard/hard/soft
knowing that need must not show
will frighten away
knowing that we must
walk back-wards nonchalantly on our tip-toeness
into
happiness,
if only for stingy moments
we know too much
we learn to understand everything,
to make too much sense out
of the world,
of pain
of lonely…
we buy clothes, we take trips,
we wish, we pray, we meditate, we curse, we crave, we coo,
we caw,
we need ourselves sick, we need, we need
we lonely we grow tired of tears we grow tired of fear
we grow tired but must always be soft and not too serious…
not too smart not too bitchy not too sapphire
not too dumb not too not too not too
a little less a little more
add here detract there
.lonely.
Copyright © Carolyn M. Rodgers, 1992, 2010. All rights reserved.
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