Inspiration: Poems

I stalked her in the grocery store: her crown of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip, her erect bearing, radiating tenderness,watching the way she placed yogurt and avocados in her basket, beaming peace like the North Star. I wanted to ask, "What aisle...

Not songs of loyalty alone are these, But songs of insurrection also, For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over. —Walt Whitman I see the dark-skinned bodies falling in the street as their ancestors fell before the whip and steel, the last blood...

The city’s streets are densely shelved with rows of salt and packaged hair. Intent on air, the funk of crave and function comes to blows with any smell that isn’t oil—the blare of storefront chicken settles on the skin and mango spritzing drips from razored hair. The...

Whose broken window is a cry of art (success, that winks aware as elegance, as a treasonable faith) is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première. Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament. Our barbarous and metal little man. “I shall create! If not a note, a hole. If not an...

I begin with love, hoping to end there. I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.          I don’t want to leave a messy corpse        Full of medicines that turn in the sun.   Some of my medicines turn in the sun. Some of us don’t need hell to be good.    ...

In the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people a man set out from the workhouse with his wife. He was walking—they were both walking—north. She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up. He lifted her and put her on his back. He...

I have known only my own shallows— Safe, plumbed places, Where I was wont to preen myself. But for the abyss I wanted a plank beneath And horizons... I was afraid of the silence And the slipping toe-hold... Oh, could I now dive Into the unexplored deeps of me— Delve...

We have memorized America, how it was born and who we have been and where. In ceremonies and silence we say the words, telling the stories, singing the old songs. We like the places they take us. Mostly we do. The great and all the anonymous dead are there. We know...

Thirteenth amendment couldn’t protect us from the war on drugs, after our leaders were jailed or shot our country pressed its fingers up against our spine but you should know we still want a new flag: Brave Like Martin Bronze Lit Movement Beautiful Like Malcolm...

When Laurens van der Post one night In the Kalahari Desert told the Bushmen He couldn't hear the stars Singing, they didn't believe him. They looked at him, half-smiling. They examined his face To see whether he was joking Or deceiving them. Then two of those small...

It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter there...

What makes a nation's pillars high And its foundations strong? What makes it mighty to defy The foes that round it throng? It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand Go down in battle shock; Its shafts are laid on sinking sand, Not on abiding rock. Is it the sword? Ask the...

I learned from my mother how to love the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole grieving...

The most important thing we've learned, So far as children are concerned, Is never, NEVER, NEVER let Them near your television set -- Or better still, just don't install The idiotic thing at all. In almost every house we've been, We've watched them gaping at the...

We have to live differently or we will die in the same old ways. Therefore I call on all Grand Mothers everywhere on the planet to rise and take your place in the leadership of the world Come out of the kitchen out of the fields out of the beauty parlors out of the...

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of...

And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the...

Yes there is fear. Yes there is isolation. Yes there is panic buying. Yes there is sickness. Yes there is even death. But, They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise You can hear the birds again. They say that after just a few weeks of quiet The sky is no...

(To One Who Doubts the Worth of Doing Anything If You Can’t Do Everything) You say the Little efforts that I make will do no good: they never will prevail to tip the hovering scale where Justice hangs in balance. I don’t think I ever thought they would. But I am...

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them...