“The poetry of people comes from the deep recesses of our unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.”
Margaret Walker
The Struggle Staggers Us
by Margaret Walker
Our birth and death are easy hours like sleep
and food and drink. The struggle staggers us
for bread, for pride, for simple dignity.
And this is more than fighting to exist,
more than revolt and war and human odds.
There is a journey from Me to You.
There is a journey from You to Me.
A union of the two strange worlds must be.
Ours is a struggle from a too warm bed,
too cluttered with a patience full of sleep.
Out of this blackness we must struggle forth:
from want of bread, of pride, of dignity.
Struggle between the morning and the night,
this marks our years, this settle too, our plight.
Frida Kahlo Self Portrait.
Sonnet in Primary Colors
by Rita Dove
This is for the woman with one black wing
perched over her eyes: lovely Frida, erect
among parrots, in the stern petticoats of the peasant,
who painted herself a present–
wildflowers entwining the plaster corset
her spine resides in the romance of mirrors.
Each night she lay down in pain and rose
to her celluloid butterflies of her Beloved Dead,
Lenin and Marx and Stalin arrayed at the footstead.
And rose to her easel, the hundred dogs panting
like children along the graveled walks of the garden, Diego’s
love a skull in the circular window
of the thumbprint searing her immutable brow.
Fourteen Lines 