“It becomes more and more difficult to avoid the idea of black men as subjects of not just racial profiling but of an insidious form of racial obliteration sanctioned by silence.”

Hope drowned in shadows emerges fiercely splendid–– boldly angelic.

They may have for their lives, or, exercising sufficient strength of will to make those dreams a reality.

Groping their way through suffocating shadows of political turmoil, economic oppression, military mayhem, starvation, and disease.

Writing for me is a form of spiritual discipline and creative vision, a means of being in the world and giving one’s love to it without compromise or dilution.

First gave in to the urge to pray to their sense of something greater than themselves and interpreted certain signs or events or silences as responses to those prayers.

Know yourself fearlessly (even quietly) for all the things you are.

A horn of plenty spills from your hands into the starved lives of millions.

Unless you are here: this garden refuses to exist. Pink dragonflies fall from the air and become scorpions scratching blood out of rocks.

Someone had to embrace positive beginnings before anyone could celebrate successful conclusions or continuations.

Art gives its vision to beauty not always recognized. And it surrenders freely — whatever power it possesses to every sincere soul that seeks it. But above all else–it presents us with the gift of ourselves.

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela might be measured in part by the profound and unique gestures made by people in different countries to honor his life upon learning of his death.

With its leaves so rich and heavy with elation and its crimson face made brighter with visions of divinity the shadow of a certain rose looks just like an angel eating light.

The singular historic moment millions now celebrate could have been tragically lost to guerrilla decontextualization.

Yet continuously occupies the same bed or pathway, and accommodates life’s endings with the same musical grace with which it accommodates

Operating to implement a balance and give us an opportunity to turn the horrors we’ve forced upon each other into something more conducive to sustaining at least minimal degrees of sanity and love.

An outrageous instinct to love and be loved executed your brain every hour on the hour.

Never use the word ‘audience.’ The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don’t have an ‘audience’. They’re talking to a single person all the time.

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.

Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they’re here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.

I’m not going to sit here now and say ‘do this,’ or ‘do that.’ But you must – must – expunge any vestige of racism.

People flatter us because they can depend upon our credulity.

I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.

Forethought and prudence are the proper qualities of a leader. [Lat., Ratio et consilium, propriae ducis artes.]

Reason and judgment are the qualities of a leader.