Black Love

Gwendolyn Brooks

Black love, provide the adequate electric
for what is lapsed and lenient in us now.
Rouse us from blur. Call us.
Call adequately the postponed corner brother.
And call our man in the pin-stripe suiting and restore him to his abler logic; to his people.
Call to the shattered sister and repair her
in her difficult hour, narrow her fever.
Call to the Elders-
our customary grace and further sun
loved in the Long-ago, loathed in the Lately;
a luxury of languish and of rust.
Appraise, assess our Workers in the Wild, lest they descend to malformation and to undertow.
Black love, define and escort our romantic young, by means and redemption,
discipline.
Nourish our children-proud, strong
little men upright-easy:
quick
flexed
little stern-warm historywomen....
I see them in Ghana, Kenya, in the city of Dar-es-Salaam, in Kalamazoo,
Mound Bayou, in Chicago.
Lovely loving children
with long soft eyes.
Black love, prepare us all for interruptions;
assaults, unwanted pauses; furnish for leavings and for losses.
Just come out Blackly glowing!
On the ledges-in the lattices-against the failing light of candles that stutter,
and in the chop and challenge of our apprehension-
be
the Alwayswonderful of this world.





Last updated January 14, 2019