Martin Luther King Jr.

A man went forth with gifts.

He was a prose poem.
He was a tragic grace.
He was a warm music.

He tried to heal the vivid volcanoes.
His ashes are
reading the world.

His Dream still wishes to anoint
the barricades of faith and of control.

His word still burns the center of the sun
above the thousands and the
hundred thousands.

The word was Justice. It was spoken.

So it shall be spoken.
So it shall be done.

--Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), African American poet, first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize, also awarded the National Book Award, and other honors. This poem was written in 1968 after the assassination of Dr. King on April 4 in Memphis. Dr. King day is the Monday closest to his birthday of January 15, 1929.

Embodied

I am embodied first by the numbers
given my grandparents
as, trembling, they signed the Dawes Act.
Outside under the moving night sky
I wonder
what it is to be made of this continent
from the beginning.
I came from the salt and water of those before me
before the creation of zero,
and then those numbers given my grandparents
by the American government
and names that belonged to others.
The past we have not forgotten.
They said you only pass on the people’s story
by telling it. You keep it by giving
it away. So I do.
For children of this land,
yesterday is close as today.
It’s why I know the forest south of here,
hickory cream and seeds for trade.
I labor daily here with the other descendants
of the pyramid builders of this continent,
pyramids greater than those of Egypt
and unknown, some already destroyed,
by the Americans.
I am one of the Indian Horse people
alive since the last standing treaty.
We are not yet the end of this line.
I am not yet the end of their plans.
And still the standing equines
hiding in the rich forest, swimming our rivers,
all so alive they breathe
for us, and two share the love,
embodied this way, water and blood,
knowledge passing between.
Once I was told you become what you think
so I think the gone animals back,
the ivory billed woodpecker,
the river of sharp teeth,
swimming black turtles shining,
all that fell from this life
I name Whole.

-- Linda Hogan (1947- ) Chickasaw poet, teacher, novelist, environmentalist, teacher, and Writer in Residence of the Chickasaw Nation, from A History of Kindness (pp. 26-27), 2020, Torrey House Press.

Passive Voice

I use a trick to teach students 
how to avoid passive voice. 

Circle the verbs. 
Imagine inserting “by zombies” 
after each one. 

Have the words been claimed 
by the flesh-hungry undead? 
If so, passive voice. 

I wonder if these 
sixth graders will recollect, 
on summer vacation, 
as they stretch their legs 
on the way home 
from Yellowstone or Yosemite 
and the byway’s historical marker 
beckons them to the site of an Indian village— 

Where trouble was brewing. 
Where, after further hostilities, the army was directed to enter. 
Where the village was razed after the skirmish occurred. 
Where most were women and children. 

Riveted bramble of passive verbs 
etched in wood— 
stripped hands 
breaking up from the dry ground 
to pinch the meat 
of their young red tongues. 


 --Laura Da’, poet and public school teacher, member of the Eastern Band of the Shawnee, from Tributaries, 2015

Bitter Fruit of the Tree

They said to my grandmother: "Please do not be bitter,"
When they sold her first-born and let the second die,
When they drove her husband till he took to the swamplands,
And brought him home bloody and beaten at last.
They told her, "It is better you should not be bitter,
Some must work and suffer so that we, who must, can live,
Forgiving is noble, you must not be heathen bitter;
These are your orders: you are not to be bitter."
And they left her shack for their porticoed house.

They said to my father: "Please do not be bitter,"
When he ploughed and planted a crop not his,
When he weatherstripped a house that he could not enter,
And stored away a harvest he could not enjoy.
They answered his questions: "It does not concern you,
It is not for you to know, it is past your understanding,
All you need know is: you must not be bitter."
And they laughed on their way to reckon the crop,
And my father walked over the wide garnered acres
Where a cutting wind warned him of the cold to come.

They said to my brother: "Please do not be bitter,
Is it not sad to see the old place go to ruin?
The eaves are sprung and the chimney tower is leaning,
The sills, joists, and columns are rotten in the core;
The blinds hang crazy and the shingles blow away,
The fields have gone back to broomsedge and pine,
And the soil washes down the red gulley scars.
With so much to be done, there's no time for being bitter.
Your father made it for us, it is up to you to save it,
What is past is over, and you should not be bitter."
But my brother is bitter, and he does not hear.

--Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989), African American poet

Losers

If I should pass the tomb of Jonah
I would stop there and sit for awhile;
Because I was swallowed one time deep in the dark
And came out alive after all.

If I pass the burial spot of Nero
I shall say to the wind, “Well, well!”—
I who have fiddled in a world on fire,
I who have done so many stunts not worth doing.

I am looking for the grave of Sinbad too.
I want to shake his ghost-hand and say,
“Neither of us died very early, did we?”

And the last sleeping-place of Nebuchadnezzar—
When I arrive there I shall tell the wind:
“You ate grass; I have eaten crow—
Who is better off now or next year?”

Jack Cade, John Brown, Jesse James,
There too I could sit down and stop for awhile.
I think I could tell their headstones:
“God, let me remember all good losers.”

I could ask people to throw ashes on their heads
In the name of that sergeant at Belleau Woods,
Walking into the drumfires, calling his men,
“Come on, you … Do you want to live forever?”

--Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), from "Playthings of the Wind," in Smoke and Steel, 1922.