black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

We don’t ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Life Perfume Sweet
The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the ’60s: Independent fire!
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Fire Flower Independent Language Poet Sweet
I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don’t pay attention ’cause it probably has floated into somebody else’s head.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Attention Float Head Poet Yourself
When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Poem Start Thinking World Writing
We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Cool Death Reality Sing
Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Goodness Health Inheritance Progress World
There are no magics or elves or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must wizard a track through our own screaming weed.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Guide Lost Magic Scream Time
What I’m fighting for now in my work… for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Black Expression Fight Home Oppression Project Work
And if sun comes how shall we greet him? shall we not dread him, shall we not fear him after so lengthy a session with shade?
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Come Fear Greet Himself Session Sun
I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Black White
To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Hand Lights Love Touch Yourself
No man can give me any word but Wait.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Man Patience Poet Wait Word Writing
She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Deep Hereslf Learning Love Moments
Don’t let anyone call you a minority if you’re black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You’re not less than anybody else.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Black Identity Minority Worth Yourself
I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Health Myself Thinking
Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Day Night Yourself

We don’t ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

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We don’t ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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