 Poetry: February 23, 2022 Issue [#11232] |
This week: Gwendolyn Brooks Edited by: Stormy Lady  
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To Be In Love
by Gwendolyn Brooks
To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.
You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.
Suddenly you know he knows too.
He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or a light spring weather.
His hand to take your hand is overmuch.
Too much to bear.
You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.
When he
Shuts a door-
Is not there_
Your arms are water.
And you are free
With a ghastly freedom.
You are the beautiful half
Of a golden hurt.
You remember and covet his mouth
To touch, to whisper on.
Oh when to declare
Is certain Death!
Oh when to apprize
Is to mesmerize,
To see fall down, the Column of Gold,
Into the commonest ash.
On June 7, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, David and Keziah Brooks welcomed Gwendolyn Brooks into the world. Shortly after Brooks' birth her father moved his family to Chicago. David Brooks was a janitor for a musical theater company. Keziah Brooks was a school teacher and had been trained on the piano in classical music. The couple had two more children after moving to Chicago. They were very strict with their children and didn't allow them to play with the kids in the neighborhood. This became a problem for Brooks when she started school. After being so isolated, she became extremely shy and made very few friends in school. Brooks started showing writing skills around seven. Her mother decided to nurture her daughter's gift and exposed her to various forms of literature. Brooks spent a lot of her childhood in her room creating her own world by reading and ewriting poetry and stories.
Brooks graduated high school and went on to study at Wilson Junior College and she graduated in 1936. Her first verses appeared in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper written primarily for the black community of Chicago. In 1939 Brooks married Henry Blakely. The couple had two children together, Henry junior and Nora. Brooks had her first book "A Street In Bronzeville," published in 1945. Followed by, "Annie Allen," a book of poetry related to growing up as a black girl in Chicago, in 1949. The following year she received the Pulitzer Prize for her book. Brooks was the first African American to receive this award. In 1953 she published her first novel, "Maud Martha."
In 1963 she published, "Selected Poems." This publication helped her secure her first teaching job at Chicago's Columbia College. Brooks traveled and lectured at several different colleges over the next couple years. In 1967 she during a trip to Fisk University Writers Conference in Nashville, an all black college, where she was met with a cold shoulder from her fellow writers. She learned to become more understanding and more conscious of her fellow African Americans in her writing. In 1968 she published her next book of poetry, "In the Mecca," in which her poetry reflected her recent college travels. That following year she was named poet laureate for the state of Illinois.
Brooks became the first African American to receive an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in 1976. She went on to receive fifty other honorary doctorates from numerous colleges and universities. Brooks received two Guggenheim Fellowships and served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. In 1990 at seventy-three she became professor of English at Chicago State University. Gwendolyn Brooks died on December 3, 2000. She was eighty-three years old.
The Mother
by Gwendolyn Brooks
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
A Sunset of the City
by Gwendolyn Brooks
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.
It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.
It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.
It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.
I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.
Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.
Somebody muffed it?? Somebody wanted to joke
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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The winner of "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] is:
Help my New Year's resolution went terribly wrong
I resolved to travel this last year
COVID put a stop
To most of my plans
Finally, got a short trip
To the U.S.
Before the latest COVID disasters
Also made a resolution
To quit obsessing
About the former guy
Let it go.
But so far I have failed
The orange man
Still haunting my nightmares
I resolve to make
The next year
A much better year
Than the horror show
Of the last Five years.
Honorable mention:
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Good luck to all 
