Well, son, I’ll tell you: Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It’s had tacks in it, And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor— Bare. But all [...]

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light [...]

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when [...]

I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table [...]

Back in a yard where ringers groove a ditch, These four in shirtsleeves congregate to pitch Dirt-burnished iron. With appraising eye, One sizes up a peg, hoists and lets fly— A clang resounds as though [...]

Ginsberg, Ginsberg, burning bright, Taunter of the ultra right, What blink of the Buddha’s eye Chose the day for you to die? Queer pied piper, howling wild, Mantra-minded flower child, Queen of Maytime, misrule’s lord [...]

Suppose your life a folded telescope Durationless, collapsed in just a flash As from your mother’s womb you, bawling, drop Into a nursing home. Suppose you crash Your car, your marriage — toddler laying waste [...]

If you were a scoop of vanilla And I were the cone where you sat, If you were a slowly pitched baseball And I were the swing of a bat, If you were a shiny [...]

The living come with grassy tread To read the gravestones on the hill; The graveyard draws the living still, But never any more the dead. The verses in it say and say: ‘The ones who [...]

The nights have grown cool again, like the nights Of early spring, and quiet again. Will Speech disturb you? We’re Alone now; we have no reason for silence. Can you see, over the garden-the full [...]