`To Gwen With Love' - poet Gwendolyn Brooks - Brief Article

Ebony, Feb, 2001

Great Poet Captured Soul of Black America

WE were children together in the struggle and storm that created a new America and a new us. She published her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, in 1945, in the same year and at almost the same time that EBONY was born. From that moment, in the turning point of worlds that was mid-20th-century America, we sang her praises and followed her light. When she became the first African-American to receive the Pultizer Prize, we said she was the harbinger of a new poem and a new Black America. When she mothered and mentored a new generation of poets, when she sang in a new Black voice from a new mountaintop, winning White House honors and the praise of the critics, when she made poetry talk about Birmingham and Montgomery and Johannesburg and the last days of De Witt Williams, we marveled and printed her works. And when, in December, Gwendolyn Brooks, the Poet Laureate of the Black Spirit, died in her 83rd year, after six generations of Gwendolyning, we joined the mighty chorus of Black men and women--African kings and queens, slaves, sharecroppers, rappers, rhymers, praise singers and troth-tellers, Langston Hughes, Martin, Malcolm, Rosa Parks, Henry Blakely, Harold Washington--who echoed the mighty words of her pen:

   We are each other's business. We are each other's harvest. We are each
   other's magnitude and bond.

IN MONTGOMERY

   WABX, the Soul station.
   "Come ON, stag the SONG this mawnin'!"
   The Soul Stirrers sing the song.
   --WABX is-bemoaning
   Astronaut-talk of a Government Visitor
   to Alabama State University
   .... which had NUTHIN', but NUTHIN' to do with
   black folks...."

   "O Happy Day! (when Jesus washed, oh
   when He washed.... my sins away!)"

   "The Old Ship of Zion!"

   WABX is pleading:
   "Try to feed somebody who's, HUNGRY.
   Try to clothe somebody who's NAKED.
   Try to visit somebody who's SICK or in PRISON.
   Won't cha?"
   The Soul Stirrers sing.

   Martin Luther King is not free.
   Nor is Montgomery

BLACK LOVE

   Black love, provide the adequate electric
   For what is lapsed and lenient in us
   now.

   Rouse us from blur. Call us.

   Call adequately the postponed corner
   brother.
   And call our man in the pin-stripe
   suiting and restore him to His abler
   logic; to his people.

   Call to the shattered sister and repair
   her
   in her difficult hour, narrow her
   fever.

   Call to the Elders
   our customary grace and further sun
   loved in the Long-ago, loathed in the
   Lately:
   a luxury of languish and of rust.

   Appraise, assess our Workers in the
   Wild, test they descend
   to malformation and to undertow.

   Black love, define and escort our
   romantic young, by means and
   redemption,
   discipline.

   Nourish our children--proud, strong
   little men upright-easy:
   quick
   flexed
   little stern-warm historywomen....
   I see them in Ghana, Kenya, in the
   city of Dar-es-Salaam, in Kalamazoo,
   Mound Bayou, in Chicago.

   Lovely loving children
   with long soft eyes.

   Black love, prepare us all for inter
   ruption;
   assaults, unwanted pauses; furnish
   for leavings and for losses.

   Just come out Blackly glowing!

   On the ledges--in the
   lattices: against the failing light of
   candles that stutter, and in the chop
   and challenge of our apprehension--
   be
   the Alwayswonderful of this world.

AN ARRIVAL

   A tribute to Ourselves. And to the
   will

   the precise will,
   the full will
   that manages Arrivals through
   the fire; that manages revisions of the
   wave.

   Beyond
   the genuine crucifixions, and the sleep,
   the steep flint, the high
   howl of the hurricane, the wide
   ice,
   across our self-recovery and redress--
   we look at one another.

   And we love.

CHICAGO, THE I WILL CITY

   Now, the way of the I Will city is on this wise:
   ripe
   roused
   ready:
   richly rambunctious, implausible:
   sudden, or saddle-steady.

   In the jamboree jounce and jumble of
   our Season of Senselessness
   the I Will city is ready to rise.
   Toward robust radiance.
   Valid!
   Away from hunger, anger, and from dread.
   Toward health and difficult Splendor.
   Toward immense
   creative indignation and defense.

   Toward, verily,
   the level land beneath the solid tread.

SPEECH TO THE YOUNG SPEECH TO THE PROGRESS-TOWARD

(Among them Nora and Henry III)

   Say to them,
   say to the  down-keepers,
   the sun-slappers,
   the self-soilers,
   the harmony-hushers,
   "Even if you are not ready for day
   it cannot always be night."
   You will be right.
   For that is the hard home-run.

   Live not for battles won.
   Live not for the-end-of-the-song.
   Live in the along.