“Versos Sencillos” (Excerpt) by José Martí (1853–1895)

Yo soy un hombre sincero

de donde crece la palma,

y antes de morirme quiero

echar mis versos del alma.

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

William Shakespeare

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,

And broils root out the work of masonry,

Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory.

’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room

Even in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the ending doom.

So, till the Judgement that yourself arise,

You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Sonnet 55

I look at the world

BY LANGSTON HUGHES

I look at the world

From awakening eyes in a black face—

And this is what I see:

This fenced-off narrow space

Assigned to me.

I look then at the silly walls

Through dark eyes in a dark face—

And this is what I know:

That all these walls oppression builds

Will have to go!

I look at my own body   

With eyes no longer blind—

And I see that my own hands can make

The world that's in my mind.

Then let us hurry, comrades,

The road to find.

ICE Agents Storm My Porch

BY MARIA MELENDEZ KELSON

The Indiscriminate Citizenry of Earth

are out to arrest my sense of being a misfit.

“Open up!” they bellow,

hands quiet before my door

that’s only wind and juniper needles, anyway.

You can’t do it, I squeak from inside.

You can’t make me feel at home here

in this time of siege for me and mine, mi raza.

Legalized suspicion of my legitimacy

is now a permanent resident in my gut.

“Fruit of the prickly pear!” they swear,

striding up to my table

to juice me a glass of pink nectar.

They’ve brought welcome baskets

stuffed with proof I’m earthling.

From under a gingham cover,

I tug a dark feather

iridescing green — cohering

to “magpie” thought,

to memory’s chatter,

to mind. Mine.

And here they have my mind translated

into a slate-surfaced pond, which

vibrates in the shape

of a cottonwood’s autumn molt,

which trees me to dirt, which soils me

heat & freeze —

But you’ll always be

one definitive document short! I complain.

Doubts can forever outstrip

your geo-logic.

For which they produce

a lock of my natal dust,

bronzed

to the fluttering fiber

of lacebark pine.

Where’d they get that stuff?

The baskets are bottomless,

and it’s useless for me to insist

on being distinct.

Undergoing re-portation,

I’m awakened to a Center,

where walls

between all beings

are dreamt to dissolve.

For My People

BY MARGARET WALKER

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs

repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues

and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an

unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an

unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the

gone years and the now years and the maybe years,

washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending

hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching

dragging along never gaining never reaping never

knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama

backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor

and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking

and playhouse and concert and store and hair and

Miss Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn

   to know the reasons why and the answers to and the

   people who and the places where and the days when, in

   memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we

   were black and poor and small and different and nobody

   cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to

   be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and

   play and drink their wine and religion and success, to

   marry their playmates and bear children and then die

  of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street

   and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New

   Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy

   people filling the cabarets and taverns and other

   people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and

   land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

    being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

    burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled

    and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

    who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in

    the dark of churches and schools and clubs

    and societies, associations and councils and committees and

    conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and

    devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,

    preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by

    false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way

  from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

   trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

    all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

   bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

   generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

   loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

   healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

   in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

   be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now

    rise and take control.

Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman

BY SONIA SANCHEZ

1

Picture a woman

riding thunder on

the legs of slavery ...

2

Picture her kissing

our spines saying no to

the eyes of slavery ...

3

Picture her rotating

the earth into a shape

of lives becoming ...

4

Picture her leaning

into the eyes of our

birth clouds ...

5

Picture this woman

saying no to the constant

yes of slavery ...

6

Picture a woman

jumping rivers her

legs inhaling moons ...

7

Picture her ripe

with seasons of

legs ... running ...

8

Picture her tasting

the secret corners

of woods ...

9

Picture her saying:

You have within you the strength,

the patience, and the passion

to reach for the stars,

to change the world ...

10

Imagine her words:

Every great dream begins

with a dreamer ...

11

Imagine her saying:

I freed a thousand slaves,

could have freed

a thousand more if they

only knew they were slaves ...

12

Imagine her humming:

How many days we got

fore we taste freedom ...

13

Imagine a woman

asking: How many workers

for this freedom quilt ...

14

Picture her saying:

A live runaway could do

great harm by going back

but a dead runaway

could tell no secrets ...

15

Picture the daylight

bringing her to woods

full of birth moons ...

16

Picture John Brown

shaking her hands three times saying:

General Tubman. General Tubman. General Tubman.

17

Picture her words:

There’s two things I got a

right to: death or liberty ...

18

Picture her saying no

to a play called Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

I am the real thing ...

19

Picture a Black woman:

could not read or write

trailing freedom refrains ...

20

Picture her face

turning southward walking

down a Southern road ...

21

Picture this woman

freedom bound ... tasting a

people’s preserved breath ...

22

Picture this woman

of royalty ... wearing a crown

of morning air ...

23

Picture her walking,

running, reviving

a country’s breath ...

24

Picture black voices

leaving behind

lost tongues ...

Passive Voice

BY LAURA DA’

I use a trick to teach students

how to avoid passive voice.

Circle the verbs.

Imagine inserting “by zombies”

after each one.

Have the words been claimed

by the flesh-hungry undead?

If so, passive voice.

I wonder if these

sixth graders will recollect,

on summer vacation,

as they stretch their legs

on the way home

from Yellowstone or Yosemite

and the byway’s historical marker

beckons them to the

site of an Indian village—

Where trouble was brewing.

Where, after further hostilities, the army was directed to enter.

Where the village was razed after the skirmish occurred.

Where most were women and children.

Riveted bramble of passive verbs

etched in wood—

stripped hands

breaking up from the dry ground

to pinch the meat

of their young red tongues.

At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border

BY WILLIAM E. STAFFORD

This is the field where the battle did not happen,

where the unknown soldier did not die.

This is the field where grass joined hands,

where no monument stands,

and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,

unfolding their wings across the open.

No people killed—or were killed—on this ground

hallowed by neglect and an air so tame

that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

"Although the Wind..." – Izumi Shikibu

(c. 974–1030) (Waka poem, Heian period)

Although the wind

blows terribly here,

the moonlight also leaks

between the roof planks

of this ruined house.

Even this fragile place

holds beauty—

if you only look

through the cracks.

"The River of Heaven" – Saigyō (1118–1190)

Although the wind

blows terribly here,

the moonlight also leaks

between the roof planks

of this ruined house.

Even this fragile place

holds beauty—

if you only look

through the cracks.

"Winter Day” by Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902)

The sky so pale and clear,

Cold wind whistles through the bare trees.

Snowflakes fall slowly down,

Covering the earth like a soft white blanket.

Even the birds seem quiet now,

Huddled close for warmth and rest.

The world is still,

Waiting for spring’s bright return.

“Spring Morning” by Yosa Buson (1716–1784)

Morning breaks gently,

The garden wakes with soft light—

Blossoms stretch and yawn,

Bees hum their lazy tune,

Clouds drift slowly in the blue.

Everything feels new again,

The promise of growth and play

Waiting just beyond the door.