Wicked Wednesday

Wicked Wednesdays

This week’s Wicked Wednesday will feature poets with natural hair in honor of National Poetry Month! By far, one of my favorite months of the year thanks to 30/30. Hope you enjoy this installation of Wicked Wednesday!

 

Lucille Clifton

"poem to my uterus"

you uterus
you have been patient
as a sock
while i have slippered into you
my dead and living children
now
they want to cut you out
stocking i will not need
where i am going
where am i going
old girl
without you
uterus
my bloody print
my estrogen kitchen
my black bag of desire
where can i go
barefoot
without you
where can you go
without me

Quincy Troupe

"Snow & Ice"

ice sheets sweep this slick mirrored dark place
space as keys that turn in tight, trigger
pain of situations
where we move ever so slowly
              so gently into time - traced agony
the bright turning of imagination
so slowly
grooved through revolving doors, opening up to enter
mountains where spirits walk voices, ever so slowly
swept by cold, breathing fire
                        as these elliptical moments of illusion
link fragile loves sunk deep in snows as footprints
the voice prints cold black gesticulations
bone bare voices
              chewed skeletal choices
in fangs of piranha gales
spewing out slivers of raucous laughter
glinting bright as hard polished silver nails

 

Alice Walker

"THEY WHO FEEL DEATH"

(FOR MARTYRS)

They who feel death close as a breath
Speak loudly in unlighted rooms
Lounge upright in articulate gesture
Before the herd of jealous Gods

Fate finds them receiving
At home.

Grim the warrior forest who present
Casual silence with casual battle cries
Or stand unflinchingly lodged

In common sand
Crucified.

 

Robert Hayden

"Those Winter Sundays"

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
   

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