Friday Poetry--For My Sisters

Since I'm breaking rules today and leaving comments and reading blogs, I might as well leave a little poetry since it is Friday. These are by Dudley Randall, Detroit poet and publisher of the Broadside Press.


Black Magic

Black girl black girl
lips as curved as cherries
full as grape bunches
sweet as blackberries

Black girl black girl
when you walk you are
magic as a rising bird
or a falling star

Black girl black girl
what's your spell to make
the heart in my breast
jump stop shake


The Profile on the Pillow

After our fierce loving
in the brief time we found to be together,
you lay in the half light
exhausted, rich,
with your face turned sideways on the pillow,
and I traced the exquisite
line of your profile, dark against the white,
delicate and lovely as a child's.

Perhaps
you may cease to love me,
or we may be consumed in the holocaust,
but I keep, against the ice and the fire,
the memory of your profile on the pillow.



On Getting a Natural

For Gwendolyn Brooks

She didn't know she was beautiful
though her smiles were dawn,
her voice was bells,
and her skin deep velvet Night.
She didn't know she was beautiful,
although her deeds,
kind, generous, unobtrusive,
gave hope to some,
and help to others,
and inspiration to us all. And
beauty is as beauty does,
they say.
Then one day there blossomed
a crown upon her head,
bushy, bouffant, real Afro-down,
Queen Nefertiti again.
And now her regal woolly crown
declares,
I know
I'm black
AND
beautiful.


Selections from the Poetry of Black American: Anthology of the 20th Century