Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.” — Gwendolyn Brooks - Gwendolyn Brooks

He ran like a mad thing into the night
And the words in his mouth were stinking.
By the time he had hurt his first white man
He was no longer thinking.
By the time he had hurt his fourth white man
Rudolph Reed was dead.
His neighbors gathered and kicked his corpse.
"Nigger—" his neighbors said.

Since a man must bring
To music what his mother spanked him for
When he was two: bits of forgotten hate,
Devotion: whether or not his mattress hurts:
The little dream his father humored: the thing
His sister did for money: what he ate
For breakfast — and for dinner twenty years
Ago last autumn: all his skipped desserts.

In Little Rock the people sing
Sunday hymns like anything,
through Sunday pomp and polishing.

And after testament and tunes,
Some soften Sunday afternoons
With lemon tea and Lorna Doones.

I forecast
And I believe