Poems: Frances E. W. Harper & Walt Whitman

Just a quick note to congratulate poets Rigoberto González and Joan Larkin on jointly receiving this year's Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America! I know Rigoberto personally and am especially delighted that he has received this incredible honor, whose prior recipients include Ed Roberson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Angela Jackson, Kenneth Koch, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many other great poets.
 
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Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Confederate assault on Ft. Sumter, South Carolina, which was the opening salvo of the US Civil War (1861-1865), the largest and most destructive war on American soil in our nation's history. At the end of the war, over 600,000 soldiers and civilians were killed and a great deal of the South was physically devastated, but by the horrific institution of slavery, as it had come to be in the US, had ended, and soon, two new Constitutional amendments, the 13th and 14th, would initiate the process begun in parts of the country half a decade before, to ensure equality to all Americans. The country too, though sundered in deep ways we are still reckoning with, was stitched together like the halves of an immense and thick, multicolored quilt that had been torn apart, and it too continues to be expanded and recreated.

Poets wrote about the war during its unfolding and afterwards; in fact, people still continue to write poetry--and novels, historical studies, comic books, etc.--about the US Civil War, not least because of its fundamental role in the new society, the new country, the new America, that it brought into being.  Today's selections are two poems written by figures who lived through the antebellum and Civil War era, two writers without whom the fields of African American and American literature, respectively, could have developed. They are Frances E. W. Harper (1825-1911) and Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Both are well enough known (Whitman certainly, but Harper too, as her works are now central to most explorations of 19th century African American literature and culture, Black/women's writing, feminist studies, and so on.) Harper published her first book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (echoing her and our ancestor Phillis Wheatley's 1773 volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral) in 1854, while the first version of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, one of the greatest collections of poetry in American or any literature, appeared in 1855. Each poem speaks for itself, so I'll just say: enjoy.  

AN APPEAL TO MY COUNTRYWOMEN

by Frances E. W. Harper

You can sigh o’er the sad-eyed Armenian
   Who weeps in her desolate home.
You can mourn o’er the exile of Russia
   From kindred and friends doomed to roam.

You can pity the men who have woven
   From passion and appetite chains
To coil with a terrible tension
   Around their heartstrings and brains.

You can sorrow o’er little children
   Disinherited from their birth,
The wee waifs and toddlers neglected,
   Robbed of sunshine, music and mirth.

For beasts you have gentle compassion;
   Your mercy and pity they share.
For the wretched, outcast and fallen
   You have tenderness, love and care.

But hark! from our Southland are floating
   Sobs of anguish, murmurs of pain,
And women heart-stricken are weeping
   Over their tortured and their slain.

On their brows the sun has left traces;
   Shrink not from their sorrow in scorn.
When they entered the threshold of being
   The children of a King were born.

Each comes as a guest to the table
   The hand of our God has outspread,
To fountains that ever leap upward,
   To share in the soil we all tread.

When ye plead for the wrecked and fallen,
   The exile from far-distant shores,
Remember that men are still wasting
   Life’s crimson around your own doors.

Have ye not, oh, my favored sisters,
   Just a plea, a prayer or a tear,
For mothers who dwell ’neath the shadows
   Of agony, hatred and fear?

Men may tread down the poor and lowly,
   May crush them in anger and hate,
But surely the mills of God’s justice
   Will grind out the grist of their fate.

Oh, people sin-laden and guilty,
   So lusty and proud in your prime,
The sharp sickles of God’s retribution
   Will gather your harvest of crime.

Weep not, oh my well-sheltered sisters,
   Weep not for the Negro alone,
But weep for your sons who must gather
   The crops which their fathers have sown.

Go read on the tombstones of nations
   Of chieftains who masterful trod,
The sentence which time has engraven,
   That they had forgotten their God.

’Tis the judgment of God that men reap
   The tares which in madness they sow,
Sorrow follows the footsteps of crime,
   And Sin is the consort of Woe.

Online text © 1998-2011 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From Poems | The Black Heritage Library Collection, 1895

BEAT! BEAT! DRUMS!

By Walt Whitman

1

BEAT! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow!   
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,   
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation;   
Into the school where the scholar is studying;   
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride;  
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, plowing his field or gathering his grain;   
So fierce you whirr and pound, you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.   
 
2

Beat! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow!   
Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets:   
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? No sleepers must sleep in those beds;
No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—Would they continue?   
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?   
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?   
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow.   
 
3

Beat! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow!     
Make no parley—stop for no expostulation;   
Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer;   
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man;   
Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties;   
Make even the trestles to shake the dead, where they lie awaiting the hearses,     
So strong you thump, O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.    

From Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, [c1900]; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/142/

Poem: Akilah Oliver

Tonight I participated in a celebration of the life and work of the poet Akilah Oliver (1961-2011, photo at left by Theresa Hurst), a poet, lyricist, teacher, mentor, activist, mother, friend, and inspiration to many. (She was also a native St. Louisan who grew up in Los Angeles.) It was an incredibly moving event, and brought me closer to Akilah, I think, than I had ever experienced during the period that I knew her and her work, which was mostly from afar. One of the highlights of the evening was hearing so many of her former students from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University, Summer Writing Program, talking about how important she was to them, how her charge to "keep writing" really served as a creative spur, and the work they read testified to this.  I read a snippet from an earlier version of Akilah's book The Putterer's Notebook: an Anti-Memoir, that I found online, on Trickhouse's site; it turns out that Akilah, a meticulous editor, had pared it away, but I loved the memoiristic anti-memoir feel of it, and, as reading it aloud made clear, it is as much poetry as it is prose.

From an earlier version of The Putterer's Notebook: an Anti-Memoir:

you were not concluding a desire, backed

  against the wall, your upper thigh

  exposed through the riddling stockings   

as  an event can simultaneously be happening

  and not be occurring, a very first morning

a passing across the self, & my old friend

  the radio, red velvet hot pants,

  a fashion show graduation from the Sears

  Charm School for girls, mix and match 

I wanted a self so badly, I turned the dial

  to see what was on the other side,

  joan armatrading, we tried chance translations

  of ‘jah’ based loosely on context clues, that girl

  my sister, I saw her last month in l.a. at the wedding,

  I thought she’d be a surfer or the wife of an O.G.,

  surprise all the time, Christian lady, you look so much

  younger now, as if all the blighted

  apartments have been repaired 

 what a pretty world out there

I am a new occupant, but this particular morning,

  for example, found me wandering in terrorist shadows 

The death dreams are often sexualized, the first,

  a morphing pool of consecrated limbs floundering

  and touching in what appeared a murky body pool

to get to, one had to pass through a portal,

  not a door exactly, more like a veil, it was duplicitous

  its appearance, both sensuous and repelling, quicksand like,

  pleasure in the going down, the limbs indistinguishable

  from the souls,  a man who was neither good nor evil

  seemed to be the sentry

I kept telling him not to go, I couldn’t stop him

  from going, I tried to trick him with an earth-based

  attachment to me to keep him from going, I had to witness

  him go down there with the altered bodies,

  there to that feast

 

a recovery that exposes itself as an expectation

            as if to speak requires dream

            single lines staged as tracks

            we are not stating a truth

            a truth would require more negotiation

              than water rights

            an expectation relegates mystery to a rack

            it may be true that he was saying “dismissal”

            it may be true we expected more, then

             gradually less

            as if a dream expires

Poem: Adélia Prado

Yesterday's post was my 1,300th! Not bad after my rather obvious but unavoidable blogging decline last of the last few years.

Let me offer my deepest thanks to everyone who made my experience--meeting with young scholars, chatting with a class, and a reading in the early afternoon--at Williams College yesterday so wonderful: thank you, faculty, students and staff!

I also realized while in the car back to the Albany airport that while I love looking at mountains, I really don't think I'd want to live on or in the midst of them, at least not during wintertime in the Northern Hemisphere. But the Berkshires wowed me nevertheless.

Now, to today's poem, which is by a Brazilian poet I've mentioned once on here (I searched, having thought I'd highlighted her before): Adélia Prado (1935-), a native of Divinópolis, Brazil, and a contender, year after year, for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Prado began publishing fairly late, her first book titled Bagagem (Baggage), appearing at the age of 1976. She has since published poetry, fiction, drama, and critical work, including O coração disparado (1978, winner of the Prêmio Jabuti), Soltem o cachorro (1979), Terra de Santa Cruz (1981), Poesia reunida (1991).

In 1990, Ellen Watson translated a number of Prado's poems, which Wesleyan University Press published in the volume The Alphabet in the Park:  Selected Poems. I recall checking this this book out of the library many years ago, but must admit I recall little of it except the small canvas and intimate address of Prado's poems, the way they felt like stepping through a doorway into the living room of her heart.

I found the following poem, translated by David Coles, on Antonio Miranda's website, which describes Prado as " a Catholic intimist poet who writes about the instantaneous apprehension of reality and the transformation of this reality through a critical, and yet sensual Christian experience of the world." Check out his site, and Watson's book, for more of her poems.

FATALE

The young boys' beauty pains me,
sharp-tasting like new lemons.
I seem like a decaying actress,
but armed with this knowledge, what I really am
is a woman with a powerful radar.
So when they look through me
as if to say: just stick to your own branch of the tree,
I think: beautiful, but coltish. They're no use to me.
I will wait until they acquire indecision. And I do wait.
Just when they're convinced otherwise
I have them all in my pocket.

From Poesias reunida, by Adélia Prado, Copyright © 1991.  Translation by David Coles.

Poem: Sadakichi Hartmann

Since I've between splitting my tweeting @harriet_poetry, I thought it might be a good option to introduce a different form every day (evening, really) to provide a prompt for folks. Among the forms or genres I've suggested so far are senryus, sestinas, ekphrastic poems (I provided a very simple painting I came across on Morse St. in Chicago) and today's, the mesostic. People have written and blogged or sent me original poems, which is both amazing and heartening--and they've been strong pieces to have been written so fast. The first night, though, I suggested a "nocturne," since the prompting came fairly late in the evening, and people replied with opening lines. That got me thinking about poets who write nocturnes, and about a US poet who's little remembered today but was an early pioneer in a number of ways, no least among them as one of the first major Asian American poets: Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944, photo Modern American Poetry Site). A native of Japan with mixed Japanese-German descent, Hartmann grew up in Germany, and moved to the US in the 1890s.  A critic, actor, friend and participant in the Modernist movement, heavily influenced by symbolism, he was also one of the first pioneers of the English-language haiku.  Below is his "Nocturne," from his original 160-issue typed 1904 manuscript, which I copied from Google Books using their "Clip" function. It's not amazing that the text is online (Google!), but it is amazing that with their tool I could save it, send, embed it, or, as you see, repost it here.

From Drifting Flowers on the Sea, by Sadakichi Hartmann, manuscript edition, 1904. Copyright © Sadakichi Hartmann.

Poem: Juan Felipe Herrera

Okay, now how many of you have heard of or read the work of this incredibly talented poet, Juan Felipe Herrera? Show of hands. Of course I can't see them, and I know some are waving. But I do wonder, because despite how outstanding and prolific a poet he is, I rarely see his name mentioned in the same breath as many others of his generation. Born in 1948 in California, Herrera has published about 25 books, which include works for children, a novel in verse, and bilingual texts. One of the things I particularly like about his work is its versatility, of subject matter, voice, and form. While he draws frequently from his life, he will also set aloft a conceit like the one below, flavored by and steeped in his experiences yet resonant far beyond his own biography.

Like May Swenson, he can do a lot of different things well, and has been known to move words in very interesting ways around the page.  Herrera finally received some major props in 2008 when he won the National Book Critics Circle Award, becoming the first Latino poet to receive it. Herrera attended UCLA, Stanford, and Iowa, and has taught at California State University, Fresno and University of California, Riverside, where he directors the Art and Barbara Culver Center for the Arts. He has also taught poetry in California prisons, and works with local schools and community colleges in and around Riverside.

EL ÁNGEL DE LA GUARDA


(The Guardian Angel)


I should have visited more often.
I should have taken the sour pudding they offered.
I should have danced that lousy beggar shuffle.
I should have painted their rooms in a brighter color.
I should have put a window in there, for the daughters.
I should have provided a decent mountain for a view.
I should have nudged them a little closer to the sky.
I should have guessed they would never come out to wave.
I should have cleaned up that mole, the abyss, in the back.
I should have touched them, that's it, it comes to me now.
I should have touched them.

(From Woodland Pattern Bookstore's site) From Lotería Cards and Fortune Poems: A Book of Lives, by Juan Felipe Herrera, Linocuts by Artemil Rodrígues Copyright © City Lights, 1999. All rights reserved.

Remembering MLK Jr. + Poem: June Jordan

This is the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), one of the most tragic events in a year and era of horrors. His murder was a terrible blow to the African-American Civil Rights movement and to the push for equality for all Americans, of all races and ethnicities, genders, sexualities, religions, classes, but it also challenged those whom he had led, with whom he had walked, for whom he had fought, to keep going, and our society was irrevocably changed for the better because of him.  Rev. Dr. King was shot in cold blood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he had gone earlier in the spring of 1968 to support striking black sanitation workers, who were pushing for equal pay and conditions. I AM A MAN. In his final months, Dr. King stood and marched with the working people, with his brothers, who were only asking for fairness, decency, equal treatment. That struggle, like so many others, continues as I type this entry. It was during his return visit in April 1968, the day after he had spoken to the Mason Temple, the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, that he was killed. But I'm not saying anything most readers here do not already know.

The great poet June Jordan (1936-2002), whom I first encountered in my college years, awed and later got to meet and hear read several times, including towards the very end of her life when she also participated in a remarkable conversation at NYU with Toni Morrison, wrote the following poem in tribute and memory to Dr. King.  I am not alone in considering him to be one of the greatest figures ever to have emerged from this society, and one of the most extraordinary people in history, for his vision, his bravery, and his courage, and I think that June Jordan captures this in the most boiled-down form, almost a distillate of thought and feeling, that pours and then rills, like tears, down the page. June Jordan, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, was a native of New York and attended Barnard and the University of Chicago. She published her first book in 1968, and went on to publish nearly 30 more books. She taught at a number of colleges and universities, and when I first encountered her work, she was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook, but she went on to teach at the University of California-Berkeley. She was beloved as a teacher, but also deeply admired for her political outspokenness and her bravery in coming out. I can recall more than a few poems of hers that did not stint in telling it like it was, whether the issue was the dreadful governments of the time, or the contours of her private life.

In 1991 she founded the highly acclaimed Poetry for the People program, which, as its website says, "continues to pursue Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a beloved community for all."  One visionary, writing in tribute to another.

POEM
In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.

I

honey people murder mercy U.S.A.
the milkland turn to monsters teach
to kill to violate pull down destroy
the weakly freedom growing fruit
from being born

America

tomorrow yesterday rip rape
exacerbate despoil disfigure
crazy running threat the
deadly thrall
appall belief dispel
the wildlife burn the breast
the onward tongue
the outward hand
deform the normal rainy
riot sunshine shelter wreck
of darkness derogate
delimit blank
explode deprive
assassinate and batten up
like bullets fatten up
the raving greed
reactivate a springtime
terrorizing

death by men by more
than you or I can

STOP


II

They sleep who know a regulated place
or pulse or tide or changing sky
according to some universal
stage direction obvious
like shorewashed shells

we share an afternoon of mourning
in between no next predictable
except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal
bleach the blacklong lunging
ritual of fright insanity and more
deplorable abortion
more and
more

June Jordan, “In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust. Reprinted with the permission of The June M. Jordan Literary Trust, www.junejordan.com.

Source: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997)

Poem: May Swenson

Baseball season has officially begun, and I haven't blogged about it at all, not just because I've been busy, but because, to a degree surprising to me, I find myself less interested than in the past. I've been feeling this way with all professional sports, but whereas I could point to specific reasons (the strikes, the lockouts, the greed of the owners and many players, the misuse of public dollars to underwrite stadiums for millionaires and billionaires with little beyond ephemeral emotional and psychological benefits for the majority of people) for my waning interest in the NBA, NFL, the NHL (I still haven't gotten over their owner-labor crisis years ago), with baseball it feels as though it's struck suddenly. Perhaps it's maturity or just growing old.

Perhaps it's a deeper sense that rather than taking comfort in this pastime as the country and world fall apart, I find it more of a distraction than anything. Perhaps it was the refusal of superstar Albert Pujols, to accept a contract of somewhere around $200 million for 8 years, allegedly with an ownership stake in the team once he required.  This sort of contract would have been par for the course in the 1990s or even the money-crazy early 2000s, but since the economic crash? Not that someone already as rich as Pujols (who received a $100 million contract in 2004) or many of his peers would notice.

But--a little flame still catches for baseball. I have, in fact, glanced at the box scores of the Cardinals, Yankees, Cubs, and a few other teams. I have the free version of MLB Baseball on my phone. And I hope that the Cardinals, rather than the Cubs, can come back with a deal--say, one leg of the Saint Louis Arch?--to persuade their superstar to sign up again before a rival team snatches him. That is, if the rival team has the money to lavish on him as well.

Here then is a baseball poem, titled "Analysis of Baseball," by May Swenson (1913-1989, photo above by Laverne Harrell Clark © Arizona State University). Swenson was one the prolific 20th century American poets and a true original. An editor at New Directions until 1966, she later went on to serve as a writer in residence at a number of universities (this was the era before writers entered or even looked to the academy as a chief place of employment), conducted workshops at many different venues, and published 17 books of her own poetry and translations of other poets, as well as works for children, plays, and critical essays. Among her awards was the Bollingen Prize from Yale University Press. When I was younger she was very widely known and read, though I don't know if she's on minds and tongues as much these days, though she ought to be. Here then is her baseball poem, and yours.

ANALYSIS OF BASEBALL

It’s about the ball, the bat, and the mitt. Ball hits bat, or it hits mitt. Bat doesn’t hit ball, bat meets it. Ball bounces off bat, flies air, or thuds ground (dud) or it fits mitt. Bat waits for ball to mate. Ball hates to take bat’s bait. Ball flirts, bat’s late, don’t keep the date. Ball goes in (thwack) to mitt, and goes out (thwack) back to mitt.

Ball fits mitt, but not all the time. Sometimes ball gets hit (pow) when bat meets it, and sails to a place where mitt has to quit in disgrace. That’s about the bases loaded, about 40,000 fans exploded. It’s about the ball, the bat, the mitt, the bases and the fans. It’s done on a diamond, and for fun. It’s about home, and it’s about run.

May Swenson, “Analysis of Baseball” from New and Selected Things Taking Place (Boston: Atlantic/Little Brown, 1978). Copyright © 1978 by May Swenson. All rights reserved.

Poem: Joshua Marie Wilkinson

I am surprised I've never featured a poem by Joshua before, though I have mentioned him on this blog, I think, but he's a friend and local favorite, a wonderful poet and teacher and filmmaker and critic, who has lots of pots cooking wonderfully on the creative stove. Here is his bio from his blog:

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is a poet, teacher, editor, and filmmaker born and raised in Seattle. He is the author of five books, most recently Selenography, with Polaroids by Tim Rutili (Sidebrow Books 2010). His first film, a documentary about Califone co-directed by Solan Jensen, is called Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape (IndiePix Films 2011). He lives in Chicago. He's at joshuamarie |at| gmail |dot| com.

Actually he has many more books out--tiny gemstones of books--that you can find on his blog, which he made fun of in an interview with bomb, though blogs really old-hat now and established--and according to the New York Times allegedly being abandoned by the young'uns and some old'uns (Ron Silliman?). He also doesn't mention Rabbit Light Movies, his visual archive of poets reading their work and other fine things, or evening will come, the new online journal he edits. Or that he teaches at the fine university that I can walk to and have from time to time, Loyola University of Chicago.

Anyways, here's Joshua's poem, beginning "cuttings," from Selenography, and read it aloud and see if you can't hear his breaths as he reads, those "thes" hanging in the air:

cuttings
shoveled

up into a fortress
hiding behind where
the dead
woman bakes lemon
& mincemeat pies
we live inside the

seam of the wind the
breaker's froth the
swarm's
sleepy landing

a pond divided

by an upside-down moon more
animals learn to hollow
grow wary

& withhold their math from us

From Selenography, by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, with Polaroids by Tim Rutili.  Copyright © Joshua Marie Wilkinson and © Photography by Tim Rutili, Sidebrow Books, 2010. All rights reserved.

Poetry Month + Poem: Camille T. Dungy

It's (Inter)National Poetry Month, and for all of April I'll be wearing a new hat, as the poetweeter at @harriet_poetry! (See the feed at right.) If you're on Twitter, please do join in.  Today I've asked people to tweet their secret cities (cf. Alberto Ríos) and what poetry book they'd print for free on McNally Jackson's Espresso Book Machine and give away if they could, while also quoting snippets of poets from Gwendolyn Brooks to Bhanu Kapil to Earl of Rochester to Gil Scott-Heron.  Also, I posted a link to Japanese-German poet Yoko Tawada reading her poetry, and links to other poems up today!

I'll still be tweeting when possible at @jstheater, and I'll aim to blog a poem here daily, though perhaps without the commentary of previous years. It's my 6th year in the blogiverse, by the way (actually back in February, if you can believe it!).

Also, a few congratulations are in order:

1) to my former student Michael Lukas, whose first novel, The Oracle of Stamboul (Harper, 2011), has appeared to great acclaim this past February!

2) to my former student Christopher Shannon, one of the houdinis behind CellPoems, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize!

3) to my former student Miriam Rocek, who will soon see one of the stories she wrote while an undergraduate published online!

***

Now, for the month's first poem, one of my favorites from the 2009 (was it two years ago that this book appeared?) anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press), by its visionary editor Camille T. Dungy, whom I first met at Cave Canem back in 2001. She is the author of two highly regarded books, Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2011), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), and the forthcoming Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), winner of the Crab Orchard Review Open Book Prize, and, in addition to the Black Nature volume, has coedited with Matt O'Donnell and Jeffrey Thomson From the Fishhouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea Books, 2009).  She's Associate Professor at San Francisco State University. And now her poem!

Language

Silence is one part of speech, the war cry
of wind down a mountain pass another.
A stranger's voice echoing through lonely
valleys, a lover's voice rising so close
it's your own tongue: these are keys to cipher,
the way the high hawk's key unlocks the throat
of the sky and the coyote's yip knocks
it shut, the way the aspens' bells conform
to the breeze while the rapid's drum defines
resistance. Sage speaks with one voice, pinyon
with another. Rock, wind her hand, water
her brush, spells and then scatters her demands.
Some notes tear and pebble our paths. Some notes
gather: the bank we map our lives around.

From Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy. Copyright © University of Georgia Press, 2009. All rights reserved.