Still I Rise by Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

How I Discovered Poetry by Marilyn Nelson

It was like soul-kissing, the way the words
filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk.
All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15,
but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely as clouds borne
by a breeze off Mount Parnassus. She must have seen
the darkest eyes in the room brim: The next day
she gave me a poem she’d chosen especially for me
to read to the all except for me white class.
She smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder,
said oh yes I could. She smiled harder and harder
until I stood and opened my mouth to banjo playing
darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished
my classmates stared at the floor. We walked silent
to the buses, awed by the power of words.

Grace by Roger Robinson

Grace by Roger Robinson

That year we danced to green bleeps on screen.

My son had come early, just the 1kg of him,

all big head, bulging eyes and blue veins.

On the ward I met Grace. A Jamaican senior nurse

who sang pop songs on her shift, like they were hymns.

“Your son feisty. Y’see him just ah pull off the breathing mask.”

People spoke of her in half tones down these carbolic halls.

Even the doctors gave way to her, when it comes

to putting a line into my son’s nylon thread of a vein.

She’d warn junior doctors with trembling hands: “Me only letting you try twice.”

On the night shift she pulls my son’s incubator into her room,

no matter the tangled confusion of wires and machine.

When the consultant told my wife and I on morning rounds

that he’s not sure my son will live, and if he lives he may never leave the hospital,

She pulled us quickly aside: “Him have no right to say that – just raw so.”

Another consultant tell the nurses to stop feeding a baby, who will soon die,

and she commands her loyal nurses to feed him. “No baby must dead wid a hungry belly.” And she’d sit in the dark rocking that well fed baby,

held to her bosom, slowly humming the melody of “Happy” by Pharrell.

And I think by some chance, I’m not here and my son’s life should flicker,

then Grace, she should be the one.