My friend and teammate here at CitySquare, Keilah Jacques shared this poem with us recently. Profound.
For My People
By Margaret Walker
Margaret Walker, “For My People” from This is My Century: New and
Collected Poems. Copyright © 1989 by Margaret Walker. Reprinted by
permission of University of Georgia Press.
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and
jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;
For my people lending their
strength to the years, to the
gone years
and the now years and the maybe years,
washing
ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing
plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging
along never gaining never reaping never
knowing
and never understanding;
For my playmates in the clay
and dust and sand of Alabama
backyards
playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
and jail
and soldier and school and mama and cooking
and
playhouse and concert and store and hair and
Miss
Choomby and company;
For the cramped bewildered
years we went to school to learn
to know
the reasons why and the answers to and the
people who
and the places where and the days when, in
memory of
the bitter hours when we discovered we
were black
and poor and small and different and nobody
cared and
nobody wondered and nobody understood;
For the boys and girls who
grew in spite of these things to
be man and
woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
play and
drink their wine and religion and success, to
marry
their playmates and bear children and then die
of
consumption and anemia and lynching;
For my people thronging 47th
Street in Chicago and Lenox
Avenue in
New York and Rampart Street in New
Orleans,
lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
people
filling the cabarets and taverns and other
people’s
pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and
land and
money and something—something all our own;
For my people walking blindly
spreading joy, losing time
being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
and
tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
who
tower over us omnisciently and laugh;
For my people blundering and
groping and floundering in
the
dark of churches and schools and clubs
and
societies, associations and councils and committees and
conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
false prophet and holy believer;
For my people standing
staring trying to fashion a better way
from
confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
trying to
fashion a world that will hold all the people,
all the
faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;
Let a new earth rise. Let
another world be born. Let a
bloody
peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation
full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving
freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing
and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our
spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
be
written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and
take control.