riot grrrl of the week: GWENDOLYN BROOKS

GWENDOLYN BROOKS (June 7, 1917 – December 2, 2000)

The first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, Brooks is considered a major poet of the twentieth century. She is known for her sensitive representations of black urban life and for combining African American vernacular speech with the poetic conventions of traditional verse.
- source

we real cool by gwendolyn brooks

We real cool. We

Left school. We 

Lurk late. We 

Strike straight. We 

Sing sin. We 

Thin gin. We 

Jazz June. We 

Die soon.

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 love you

All