Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

It is a kind of love, is it not?How the cup holds the tea,How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,How the floor receives the bottoms of shoesOr toes. How soles of feet knowWhere they’re supposed [...]

I can look At my body As an old friend Who needs my help, Or an enemy Who frustrates me In every way With its frailty And inability to cope. Old friend, I shall try [...]

Being walkers with the dawn and morning Walkers with the sun and morning, We are not afraid of night, Nor days of gloom, Nor darkness, Being walkers with the sun and morning.

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important calls for my attention – the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage I need to buy for the trip. Even now [...]

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down [...]

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 [...]