For My People - Margaret Walker

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama
backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking
and playhouse and concert and store and hair and
Miss Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn
to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
people who and the places where and the days when, in
memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
were black and poor and small and different and nobody
cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to
be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
play and drink their wine and religion and success, to
marry their playmates and bear children and then die
of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox
Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and
land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time
being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
the dark of churches and schools and clubs
and societies, associations and councils and committees and
conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control.

Margaret Walker

Childhood - Margaret Walker

When I was a child I knew red miners
dressed raggedly and wearing carbide lamps.
I saw them come down red hills to their camps
dyed with red dust from old Ishkooda mines.
Night after night I met them on the roads,
or on the streets in town I caught their glance;
the swing of dinner buckets in their hands, and grumbling undermining all their words.

I also lived in low cotton country
where moonlight hovered over ripe haystacks,
or stumps of trees, and croppers' rotting shacks
with famine, terror, flood, and plague near by,
where sentiment and hatred still held sway
and only bitter land was washed away.


Margaret Walker

African-American Poet Margaret Walker 1915 - 1998

Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander (July 7, 1915 – November 30, 1998) was an African-American poet and writer. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, she wrote as Margaret Walker. One of her best-known poems is For My People.

Biography

Walker was born to Sigismund C. Walker, a Methodist minister, and Marion Dozier Walker, who helped their daughter by teaching her philosophy and poetry as a child. Her family moved to New Orleans when Walker was a young girl. She attended school there, including several years of college, before she moved north.

In 1935, Margaret Walker received her Bachelor of Arts Degree from Northwestern University, and in 1936 she began work with the Federal Writers' Project under the Works Progress Administration. In 1942, she received her master's degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa. In 1965, she returned to that school to earn her Ph.D.

Walker married Firnist Alexander in 1943; they had four children and lived in Mississippi. Walker was a literature professor at what is today Jackson State University (1949 to 1979). In 1968, Walker founded the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People (now the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center) at the school. She went on to serve as the Institute's director.

Among Walker's more popular works are her poem For My People, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1942 under the judgeship of editor Stephen Vincent Benet, and her 1966 novel Jubilee, which also received critical acclaim. The book was based on her own great-grandmother's life as a slave.

In 1975, Walker released three albums of poetry on Folkways Records - Margaret Walker Alexander Reads Langston Hughes, P.L. Dunbar, J.W. Johnson; Margaret Walker Reads Margaret Walker and Langston Hughes, and The Poetry of Margaret Walker. In 1988, she sued Alex Haley, claiming his novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family had violated Jubilee's copyright. The case was dismissed.

Walker died of breast cancer in Chicago, Illinois in 1998.

And Pushkin's exile had begun right here - Anna Akhmatova

And Pushkin's exile had begun right here,
And Lermontov's expulsion had been 'canceled.'
There is the easy grasses' scent on highland.
And only once it chanced to me to see it --
Near the lake, where shades of plane-trees hover,
In that doom hour before the evening thrusts,--
The dazzling light of the desirous eyes
Of Tamara's forever living lover.


Anna Akhmatova

Au Jardin - Ezra Pound

O you away high there,
you that lean
From amber lattices upon the cobalt night,
I am below amid the pine trees,
Amid the little pine trees, hear me!

'The jester walked in the garden.'
Did he so?
Well, there's no use your loving me
That way, Lady;
For I've nothing but songs to give you.

I am set wide upon the world's ways
To say that life is, some way, a gay thing,
But you never string two days upon one wire
But there'll come sorrow of it.
And I loved a love once,
Over beyond the moon there,
I loved a love once,
And, may be, more times,

But she danced like a pink moth in the shrubbery.
Oh, I know you women from the 'other folk',
And it'll all come right,
O' Sundays.

'The jester walked in the garden.'
Did he so?


Ezra Pound

Sonet 105 - William Alexander

Awake my Muse, and leaue to dreame of loues,
Shake off soft fancies chaines, I must be free,
Ile perch no more, vpon the mirtle tree,
Nor glide through th'aire with beauties sacred doues;
But with Ioues stately bird Ile leaue my nest,
And trie my sight against Apolloes raies:
Then if that ought my ventrous course dismaies,
Vpon the Oliues boughs Ile light and rest:
Ile tune my accents to a trumpet now,
And seeke the Laurell in another field,
Thus I that once, as Beautie meanes did yeeld,
Did diuers garments on my thoughts bestow:
Like Icarus I feare, vnwisely bold,
Am purpos'd others passions now t'vnfold.


William Alexander