POETRY

First published in 1921, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, became Hughes’s signature poem, collected in his first book of poetry “The Weary Blues”. James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, one of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry. He is known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. DREAM DEFERRED …

He was an American writer. Edgar Allan Poe, is best known for his poetry and short stories, (particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre). He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States, and is considered the inventor of the “detective fiction genre”. He was found delirious, on the streets of Baltimore, in great …

AFTER TRYING MANY YEARS After trying many years, and then near death, the able man may know an image living in the alpine stone. If at all, the high and new come slowly, and, for us, they do not last so long. Oh my beloved! Nature’s like that too, who tried for beauty times untold until she triumphed, and made …

Her special gift (her grandmother), bestows a sense of mystical connection to the Moravians. Hilda Doolittle was born into the Moravian community of her artistic mother, in Pennsylvania, and reared in a Philadelphia. There, her father was director of the Flower Observatory. Her “The Gift” is cast in the voice of a child, who is cognizant of own dreams and …

She was born to wealth, because her paternal grandfather developed the cotton industry of Massachusetts, where two towns (Lowell and Lawrence), are named for the families. Amy Lowell began a lifelong habit of book collecting, accepting a marriage proposal, but the young man set his heart on another woman. She went to Europe and Egypt, to improve her health. 1910, …

When she was a little angel, her mother wanted a girl child who can become a writer. Her mother believed in pre-natal influences (according to her, parents could influence the soul personality of their little angel child). Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born on a farm in Wisconsin, becoming an American poet, and “Poems of Passion” was her best-known work, and …

BOKETTO Outside my window it’s never the same, some mornings jasmine slaps the house, some mornings sorrow. There is a word I overheard today, meaning lost, not on a career path or across a floating bridge: Boketto, to stare out windows without purpose. Don’t laugh; it’s been too long since we leaned into the morning: bird friendly coffee and blueberry …

ALPHABET STREET “Adore” was my song, Back in ’87. Cool beans, I liked to say, desperately uncool. Except for you. Florida, a dirty hand gesture; the state, pay dirt. Headphones on, I heard, in a word, you were sex, just in time. Who was I kidding? Then, as now, love is too weak to define. Mostly I just ran, not …

IF YOU LOSE YOUR LOVER If you lose your lover, rain hurt you. Blackbirds brood over the sky trees, burn down everywhere brown, rabbits run under car wheels. Should your body cry? To feel such blue and empty bed dont bother. If you lose your lover comb hair go here, or there get another. https://www.amazon.com/Work-Common-Woman-Collected-1964-1977/dp/0895941554?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

BELIEVE ME IF ALL THOSE ENDEARING YOUNG CHARMS – Believe me, if all those endearing young charms, which I gaze on so fondly today, were to change by tomorrow, and fleet in my arms, like fairy-gifts fading away. Thou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art, let thy loveliness fade as it will, and around the dear ruin …