black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

Gwendolyn Brooks

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
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

Acceptance Different Existence Flower Ourselves Reason
What, what am I to do with all of this life?
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Life Myself Philosophy Unknown
With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Milk Myself
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
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
She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Deep Hereslf Learning Love Moments
I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Black White
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Death Gold Identity Moments
Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Air Book Flame Flower Medicine
When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Blue Body Himself Love Man Rich Right Sweet Water World
There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Insurance Man Oneself White
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
We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Bond Business Each Other Friendship Relationship
Beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Easy Fools Fuel Grief
Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Life Perfume Sweet

Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

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Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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