Black Poetry Day

Today we celebrate Black Poetry Day.  

It is celebrated always on October 17th in honor of Jupiter Hammon's birthday. 

Hammon was born in 1711 into slavery at the Henry Lloyd's estate on Long Island, New York. "Hammon was purportedly allowed access to the manor library and was educated with the estate owner’s children, even working with Henry Lloyd in his business ventures."  Hammon's first work was published in 1760. He was largely considered a religious poet. 

(Information retrieved at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jupiter-hammon#tab-poems)

So today in honor of Hammon, we celebrate the importance of all black poets and authors and their contributions to the literary world.

I share here a few of my favorites:

(My mother had this poem framed upon our living room wall for years.  

It has always been beautiful to me.)

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams 

For if dreams die 

Life is a broken-winged bird 

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

Written by Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,

this man, superb in love and logic, this man

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Written by Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

Listen Children

Listen children 

keep this in the place 

you have for keeping 

always, 

keep it all ways

We have never hated black

Listen 

we have been ashamed 

hopeless tired mad 

but always 

all ways 

we loved us

We have always loved each other 

children all ways

Pass it on 

Written by Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)

(All poems retrieved from: http://www.afropoets.net/ )