Three Women Poets and their Poems.......

Hello. This week I am just going to write about several female poets and their poetry. This is in continuation of National Poetry Month. Female poets have contributed much in the way of their writings and have caused others to follow in their footsteps.

LUCILLE CLIFTON is author of several award-winning collections of poetry and is a two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize.
Lucille was born in Depew, NY and was educated at Howard University and Fredonia Stte Teachers' College. In addition to her career as a sales clerk, literature assistant, visiting writer, and poet-in-residence, Clifton has raised six children and published more than 20 books of poetry, fiction and children's literature. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, received the Juniper prize in 1980 and was named Maryand's official poet laurete. She says of herwork: "I m a black woman poet and I sound like one."


New Bones

we will wear
new bones again
we will leave
these raining days
break out through
another month
into sun and honey time
world buzz over us like bees,
we be splendid in new ones
other people think they know
how long life is
how strong life is
we know.

Miss Rosie

When I watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when I watch you
in your own man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
I say
when I watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal
in Georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
I stand up
through your destruction
I stand up

To My Last Period

well girl, goodbye
after thirty-eight years
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow

now it is done
and i feel just like the grandmother who,
after the hussy has gone
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn't she
beautiful? wasn't she beautiful?

Next poet is: GWENDOLYN BROOKS: Gwendolyn was born in Topeka, Kansas and grew up in Chicago. A graduate of Wilson Junior College, she has taught poetry at colleges and universities all over the country. In 1950, she was ther first African Amerivan to win the Pulitzer Prize. She was named poet laureate of Illinois in 1968 and was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1985, the first African American to hold the position. "My aim," she once said, :is to write poems that will somehow successfully call...all black people in pulpits...black people in mines, on farms, on thrones." Among her reently published books are Black (1987) and The Near-Johannesburg Boy 1986.

The Sonnet-Ballad by Gwendolyn Brooks

Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?

They took my lover's tallness off to war,

Left me lamenting, Now I cannot guess

What can I use an empty heart- cup for.

He won't be coming back here anymore.

Some day the war will end, but oh I knew

When he went walking grandly out that door

That my sweet love would have to be untrue.

Would have to be untrue. Would have to court our

Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange

Possessive arms and beauty of a sort

Can make a hard man hesitate- and change

And he will be the one to stammer, "Yes."

Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?

NIKKI GIOVANNI has recently publidhed an illustrated 'love poem' entitled Knoxville, Tenessee for her grandmother, Louvenia Watson. She is also the author of The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovani. She is also the author of The Selected poems of Nikki Giovanni(1996), the children's book The Genie in the Jar and other works. The 1996 winner of the Langston Hughes Award, Dr. Giovanni is a member of the National Advisory Board of the Underground Railroad Freedom Center. In April 2002, she was awarded the first Rosa L. Parks Woman of Courage Awaed.

AGE

we tend to fear old age as some sort of disorder

that can be cured with the proper dose of aspirin

or perhaps a bit of Ben-Gay for the shoulders

it does of course pay to advertise

one hates the idea of the first gray hair

a shortness of breath, devastating blows to the ego

indications we are doing what comes natually

it's almost laughable

that we detest aging

when we first became aware we want it

little girls of four or five push

with eyes shining brightly at gran or mommy

the lie that they are seven or eight

little girls at ten worry

that a friend has gotten her monthly

and she has not

little girls of twelve

cn be socially crushed

by lack of nobs on their chests

little boys of fourteen want

to think they want a woman

the little penis that simply won't erect

is shattering to their idea of manhood

if perhaps they get a little peach fuzz

on their faces they may survive

adolescence proving there may indeed be life

after high school

the children begin to play older

without kowing the price is weariness

age teaches us that our virtues

are either virtuous or our vices

foul

age doesn't matter really

what frightens is mortality

it dawns upon us that we can die

at some point it occurs as we surely shall

it is not death we fear

but the loss of youth

not the youth of our teens

where most of the thinking took place

somewhere between the navel and the knee

but the youth of our thirties whose career

decisions were going well

and we were respected for our abilities

or the youth of our forties

where our decisions proved if not right

then not wrong either

and the house after all is half paid

it may simply be that work

is so indelibly tied

to age that the loss

of work brings the depression

of impending death

there are so many too many

who have never worked

and therefore for whom death

is a consant companion

as lack of marriage

lower divorce rates

lack of life

presents death

the unwillingness to try

is worse than any failure

in youth our ignorance gives us couage

with age our courage gives us hope

with hope we learn that man is more

than the sum of what he does

we also are what we wish we did

and age teaches us

that even that does not matter.

Nikki G. is powerful...I did not have much background information, I have her website address but I could not get to it once I started this blog. next week, I will feature another one of her poems with a bio from birth. also Maya Angelou and Rita Dove....stay tuned!