Crown: Ode to the Fresh Cut by Derrick Barnes: BOND CRC NEWB FIC BAR & GAC Juvenile PZ7.B26154 Cro 2017
Pass it on: African-American poetry for children by Wade Hudson: BOND CRC 811.008 PAS
The Palm of my Heart: Poetry by African American Children by Davida Adedjouma: BOND CRC 811 PAL & GAC Juvenile PS591.N4 P25 1996
Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets by Kwame Alexander: BOND CRC E ALE
The Crossover by Kwame Alexander: GAC Juvenile PZ7.5.A44 Cr 2014
The Watcher by Nikki Grimes: BOND CRC 811 GRI
Words with Wings by Nikki Grimes: GAC Juvenile PZ7.G88429 Wor 2013
Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes: BOND CRC FIC GRI
Dark Sons by Nikki Grimes: BOND CRC FIC GRI
Thanks a Million: Poems by Nikki Grimes: BOND CRC 811 GRI
Welcome, Precious by Nikki Grimes: BOND CRC E GRI
It’s Raining Laughter: Poems by Nikki Grimes: BOND CRC 811 GRI
Under the Christmas Tree by Nikki Grimes: BOND CRC 811.54 GRI
My Man Blue: Poems by Nikki Grimes: BOND CRC 811 GRI & GAC Juvenile PS3557.R489982 M96 2002
Danitra Brown Leaves Town by Nikki Grimes: GAC Juvenile PZ7.G88429 Dan 2002
Wild, Wild Hair by Nikki Grimes: GAC Juvenile PZ8.3.G8875 Wi 1997
Meet Danitra Brown by Nikki Grimes: GAC Juvenile PS3557.R489982 M44 1994
Harlem
by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore --
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over --
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Source: The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (Langston Hughes, 2002).
A Woman Speaks
by Audre Lorde
Moon marked and touched by sun
The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, 1968-1998 by Nikki Giovanni: GAC Stacks PS3557.I55 A6 2003
Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems by Yusef Komumyakaa: GAC Stacks PS3561.O455 N46 1993
Black Poets Edited by Dudley Randall: GAC Stacks PS591.N4 B535
Affrilachia by Frank X. Walker: GAC Stacks PS3573.A425332 A32 2000
Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove: GAC Stacks PS3554.O884 T47 1986
Collected Poems: 1974-2004 by Rita Dove: GAC Stacks PS3554.O884 A6 2016
Homegirls and Handgrenades by Sonia Sanchez: GAC Stacks PS3569.A468 H64 2007
Directed by Desire by June Jordan: GAC Stacks PS3560.O73 A17 2007
Leadbelly: Poems by Tyehimba Jess: GAC Stacks PS3610.E874 L43 2005
The Feel Trio by Fred Moten: GAC Stacks PS3563.O8867 F44 2014
Lighthead: Poems by Terrance Hayes: GAC Stacks PS3558.A8378 L54 2010
Soprano Sky by Sonia Sanchez: GAC Stacks PS3569.A468 U53 1987
Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People by Nikki Giovanni: GAC Juvenile PS3557.I55 E4
The Genie in the Jar by Nikki Giovanni: GAC Juvenile PS3557.I55 G46 1996
Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like my Sister Kate: Looking at the Harlem Renaissance Through Poems Edited by Nikki Giovanni: BOND CRC 811 GIO
Spin a Soft Black song: Poems for children by Nikki Giovanni: GAC Juvenile PS3557.I55 S68 1987
Who Look at Me by June Jordan: GAC Juvenile PS3560.O73 W5 Music CD:
DAMN by Kendrick Lamar: Print Copy & GAC Music CD Collection M1630.18.L35 D3 2017
The Inflammation
By Nikky Finney
The air in the high school is swollen. My heart balloons
as I smooth my name tag down. The woman checking
me in at Austin East Magnet High School has a warning,
“They might not have much to say.”
I have not come to measure their verbs or their vowels.
My vested interest is their red blood cells. East Knoxville,
where six students in one year, from one high school,
are dead by gun violence.
As I walk to Ms. Hall’s young writers class, 16-year-olds
with the mud-red beauty of the Maasai fly past me in the
hall late for class. There are no visible signs of bruising.
A blood test could reveal the damage done these last 400
years. A blood test is a fine modern measurement of the
homocysteine levels moving through precious growing
creative bodies. There are no blood tests in my bag and I
only have one hour to measure what I have traveled here
to know. East Knoxville, fifty years before, every grocery
store, bakery, doctor’s office, barbershop, pharmacy, juke
joint, Miss Lucille Reader of Palms, closed down and laid
to rest on the new Civic Center pyre. Blood sugar levels
bought season tickets to the Moon. Families on the East
side came to know American architecture intimately, how
the right side of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard arced
into the halls of the high school, and the left side dangled
at the front door of Jarnigan & Son Mortuary, oldest Black
business in town. A swelling is how the body begins to heal.
A blood test can be historical marker for the inflammation
of disparity. My ballooning heart enters the door of their
A, B, and O world. I am met by 14 framed faces of curious
encyclopedic sunlight. Their Wolof and Benin mouths follow
me around the room like awakened cicadas. I ask them to read.
They stop buzzing, mid-air, hold their patterns, wondering
if I have come to take something else from them. The one
in perfect white sneakers with BEATS dangling off his ears
keeps his head under his hoodie. The two by the window
use the glass as dream portal, watching, then aiming, their
father’s eyes farther out into the rising Blue Ridge Mountain
light settling the pitched roof of Jarnigan & Son. The room
is a clover field of hide, luck, and chance, but the burning
tenderness of their inflammation wants out. Inflammation
is a fight response from the body when the immune system
leaps into action even when there is no visible injury. Angelina
extends her grey tablet out to me. Her dark Motown eyes
begin their return to Earth. I read her poem as if it belongs
in my mouth. Their words reach and ricochet. My immune
system kicks in just as Jamartray decides I might be worthy,
handing me his fragile worry-filled word rope, his mother’s
Lindy Hop, in and out of the Double-Dutch rope of illness.
Shiasia’s spunky Afro-Latin is read with Black girl attitude
kept under my tongue for moments when the fear in their
eyes is molten and strawberry. She cheers. Leonard begins
with a piercing refusal to never be a statistic and ends with
his mother’s double helix—HeLa—never-ending cells of
extraordinary love alighting every face in the room. It is
9:00 am on a Friday morning in East Knoxville. I have lost
my tally and count. The young poets have broken my fever.
Copyright © 2022 by Nikky Finney. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 24, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
Ridiculous Light: Poems by Valencia Robin: BOND CRC 811 ROB c.2
Sky Raining Fists by J.K. Anowe: CRC 811 ANO
Hoops: Poems by Major Jackson: CRC 811 JAC
Brown: Poems by Kevin Young: BOND CRC 811 YOU
I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood by Tiana Clark: BOND CRC 811 CLA & GAC Stacks PS3603.L36925 A6 2018
Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey: GAC Stacks PS3570.R433 N38 2007
Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith: GAC Stacks PS3569.M537839 B56 2008
The Animal Too Big to Kill: Poems by Shane McRae: GAC Stacks PS3613.C385747 A6 2015
Mule: Poems by Shane McRae: GAC Stacks PS3613.C385747 M85 2011
Digest by Gregory Pardlo: GAC Stacks PS3616.A737 A6 2014
Roll Deep: Poems by Major Jackson: GAC Stacks PS3610.A354 A6 2015
The War Against the Obvious by Cornelius Eady: CRC ON ORDER
Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One; Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa: CRC ON ORDER
Bloodwarm by Taylor Byas: CRC ON ORDER
New Day’s Lyric
By Amanda Gorman
May this be the day
We come together.
Mourning, we come to mend,
Withered, we come to weather,
Torn, we come to tend,
Battered, we come to better.
Tethered by this year of yearning,
We are learning
That though we weren’t ready for this,
We have been readied by it.
We steadily vow that no matter
How we are weighed down,
We must always pave a way forward.
This hope is our door, our portal.
Even if we never get back to normal,
Someday we can venture beyond it,
To leave the known and take the first steps.
So let us not return to what was normal,
But reach toward what is next.
What was cursed, we will cure.
What was plagued, we will prove pure.
Where we tend to argue, we will try to agree,
Those fortunes we forswore, now the future we foresee,
Where we weren’t aware, we’re now awake;
Those moments we missed
Are now these moments we make,
The moments we meet,
And our hearts, once all together beaten,
Now all together beat.
Come, look up with kindness yet,
For even solace can be sourced from sorrow.
We remember, not just for the sake of yesterday,
But to take on tomorrow.
We heed this old spirit,
In a new day’s lyric,
In our hearts, we hear it:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne.
Be bold, sang Time this year,
Be bold, sang Time,
For when you honor yesterday,
Tomorrow ye will find.
Know what we’ve fought
Need not be forgot nor for none.
It defines us, binds us as one,
Come over, join this day just begun.
For wherever we come together,
We will forever overcome.
The Hill We Climb
by Amanda Gorman (2021 Presidential Inauguration)
When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.
We braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.
And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.
And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true.
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.
Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it.
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.
This is the era of just redemption.
We feared at its inception.
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour.
But within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.
So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be: a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.
We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, become the future.
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain.
If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.
Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.
We will rise from the golden hills of the West.
We will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution.
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states.
We will rise from the sun-baked South.
We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.
And every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country, our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful.
When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid.
The new dawn balloons as we free it.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/20/amanda-gormans-inaugural-poem-the-hill-we-climb-full-text.html