Friday Night Poetry Corner #15A

Good evening everyone!!

This will be a 2-part edition of Friday Night Poetry Corner. For now continuing with Black History month here is a short yet, jazzy real life poem that I enjoyed throughout the years. Written by a deep-rooted poet she capture the theme of youth as a fun, reckless yet visual masterpiece and she only needed a few lines to accomplish that. This is Gwendolyn Brooks timeless joint called…

We Real Cool

We real cool. We
Left school.

We Lurk late. We
Strike straight.

We Sing sin. We
Thin Gin.

We Jazz June. We
Die soon.

(Here is another powerful one; no explanation needed :o)

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.