What My Child Learns of the Sea

Audre Lorde

What my child learns of the sea of the summer thunder of the riddles that hide in the curve of spring she will learn in my twilights and childlike revise every autumn.

What my child learns as her winters grow into time has ripened in my own body to enter her eyes with first light.

This is why more than blood or the milk I have given one day a strange girl will step to the back of a mirror cutting my ropes of sea and thunder and spring. of the way she will taste her autumnstoast-brittle or warmer than sleepand the words she will use for winter I stand already condemned.

fromThe Collected Poems of Audre Lorde

Copyright © The Audre Lorde Estate, 1997

Earth Eyes

Amanda Gorman from Call Us What We Carry

What we have done.

Currently our jaw is clamped down, our shoulders nailed to the ears, bones braced for brutal battle. By Think of the next generation we mean: Every day this very ground spoils beneath us, for we are bringing to all the ends of the Earth the end of all the Earth. Please believe us when we say we, too, ache to imagine something new Reparation lies not in the land we own, but the very land we owe, the soil & the toil we thieved in from the start. Nothing is a grander summitry than this: water, drinkable; our air, breathable; birds, built & blurred on a breeze; trees heaving huge sighs into the heavens; our children, giggling & gilded in grass. Earnest for the first time, we must earn this turned Earth back. Now we are begged to save it. We screech with kids who must fix the world because braving it is no longer enough. The youth will save us, they say. But even that is its own release. Our short lives now aimed at the oily-headed monsters that reared their teeth before we even gave our first wet croak. Generations of the past order, be our recruits, not our rescues. Oh, how we want our parents red & restless, as wild & dying for a difference as we are.

Copyright © Amanda Gorman, 2021

Meta Rhetoric

June Jordan

Homophobia

Racism

Self-definition

Revolutionary struggle the subject tonight for public discussion is our love we sit apart apparently at opposite ends of a line and I feel the distance between my eyes between my legs a dry

Dust Topography Of Our Separation

In the meantime people dispute the probabilities of union

They reminisce about the chasmic histories no ideology yet dares to surmount

I disagree with you

You disagree with me

The problem seems to be a matter of scale

Can you give me the statistical dimensions of your mouth on my mouth your breasts resting on my own?

I believe the agenda involves several inches (at least) of coincidence and endless recovery

My hope is that our lives will declare this meeting open

Three/Quarters Time

Nikki Giovanni

Dance with me…dance with me…we are the song…we are the music…Dance with me…

Waltz me…twirl me…do-si-do please…peppermint twist me…philly

Squeeze

Cha cha cha…tango…two step too…

Cakewalk…charleston…bougaloo…

Dance with me…dance with me…all night long… We are the music…we are the song… fromThe Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni

Copyright © by Nikki Giovanni, 2003