African American poetry – Art & Theology

Saint James, Synthia_The Dream — Synthia Saint James (American, 1949–), *The Dream*, 2013. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 34 × 26 in.

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), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and many other honors, wrote this poem in 1968 following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was originally published that year as a broadside by Broadside Press in Detroit, and it appears in I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by Negro Americans (Macmillan, 1968).

Listen to Brooks’s daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, read the poem in this WBEZ Chicago broadcast from 2018:

(Update: If the embedded video player is not showing up for you, click here.)

Grossmann, David_Autumn Flight — David Grossman (American, 1984–), *Autumn Flight*, 2018. Oil on linen panel, 30 × 40 in. Private collection.

It’s all a farce,—these tales they tell
About the breezes sighing,
And moans astir o’er field and dell,
Because the year is dying.

Such principles are most absurd,—
I care not who first taught ’em;
There’s nothing known to beast or bird
To make a solemn autumn.

In solemn times, when grief holds sway
With countenance distressing,
You’ll note the more of black and gray
Will then be used in dressing.

Now purple tints are all around;
The sky is blue and mellow;
And e’en the grasses turn the ground
From modest green to yellow.

The seed burrs all with laughter crack
On featherweed and jimson;
And leaves that should be dressed in black
Are all decked out in crimson.

A butterfly goes winging by;
A singing bird comes after;
And Nature, all from earth to sky,
Is bubbling o’er with laughter.

The ripples wimple on the rills,
Like sparkling little lasses;
The sunlight runs along the hills,
And laughs among the grasses.

The earth is just so full of fun
It really can’t contain it;
And streams of mirth so freely run
The heavens seem to rain it.

Don’t talk to me of solemn days
In autumn’s time of splendor,
Because the sun shows fewer rays,
And these grow slant and slender.

Why, it’s the climax of the year,—
The highest time of living!—
Till naturally its bursting cheer
Just melts into thanksgiving.

“Merry Autumn” by Paul Laurence Dunbar originally appeared in Oak and Ivy (Press of United Brethren Publishing House, 1893) and is now in the public domain.

Tag: African American poetry

“Martin Luther King Jr.” by Gwendolyn Brooks

“Merry Autumn” by Paul Laurence Dunbar