Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

Rudolph Reed was oaken.
His wife was oaken too.
And his two good girls and his good little man
Oakened as they grew.

My Poem is life, and not finished. It shall never be finished. My Poem is life, and can grow. Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can. I give you what I have. You don’t get all your questions answered in this world. How many answers shall be found in the developing world of my Poem? I don’t know. Nevertheless I put my Poem, which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can.

I pass you my Poem! — to tell you we are all vulnerable — the midget, the Mighty, the richest, the poor. Men, women, children, and trees. I am vulnerable.

I pass you my Poem. A poem doesn’t do everything for you. You are supposed to go on with your thinking. You are supposed to enrich the other person’s poem with your extensions, your uniquely personal understandings, thus making the poem serve you.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

What shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

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.

Is earnest enough, may earnest attract or lead to light;
Is light enough, if hands in clumsy frenzy, flimsy whimsically, enlist;
Is light enough when this bewilderment crying against the dark shuts down the shades?
Dilute confusion. Find and explode our mist.

consider the big fists breaking your little bones, or consider the vague bureaucrats stumbling, fumbling through Paper.

Already you're on Page 8.

I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.

And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
"That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May."

I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I'll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.