:-(

For some reason a lot if my poems had no analysis online

What It Feels Like

What It Feels Like

As if I've swallowed
A watermelon
And
Sidestepping
My digestive tract
It has lodged
In my heart.
There it lies
Green
& whole
with a luscious
red
heart of its own
daring me
to cut.

Alice Walker

Play

Play

Subtle, clever brain, wiser than I am, 
by what devious means do you contrive
to remain idle? Teach me, O master.

William Carlos Williams

Poem To My Girls

Poems To My Girls

I
How can Humanity
look the deer
in
the face? 

How can Mommy,
having erected
my fence?

Alice Walker

Love Song

Love Song

I lie here thinking of you:---

the stain of love
is upon the world!
Yellow, yellow, yellow
it eats into the leaves,
smears with saffron
the horned branched the lean
heavily
against a smooth purple sky!
There is no light
only a honey-thick stain
that drips from leaf to leaf
and limb to limb
spoiling the colors
of the whole world-

you far off there under
the wine-red selvage of the west!

William Carlos Williams

She

She

She is the one
who will notice
that the first snapdragon
of Spring
is
in bloom;

She is the one
who will tell the most
funny
&
complicated
joke.

She is the one
who will surprise you
by knowing the difference
between turnips
and collard
Greens;

& between biscuits
& scones.

She is the one who knows where
to take you
for dancing
or where the food
& the restaurant's
decor
are not
to be
missed.

She is the one
who is saintly.

She is the one
who reserves the right
to dress
like a slut.

She is the one
who takes you shopping;

She is the one
who knows where
the best clothes
are bought
cheap.

She is the one
who warms your
home
with her fragrance;

the one who brings
music, magic& joy.

She is the one
speaking
the truth
from her heart.

She is the one at the bedside
wedding, funerals
or divorce
of all the best people
you dearly love.

She is the one
with courage.

She is the one
who speaks
her bright mind;

She is the one
who encourages young&
old
to do the same.

She is the one
on the picket line, at the barricade,
at the prison, in jail;

She is the one
who is there.

If they come for me
& I am at her house
I know
she will hide me.

If I tell her
where I have hidden
my heart
she will keep
my secret
safe.

She is the one
who
without hesitation
comes to my aid&
my defense.

She is the one
who believes
my side of the story
First;

She is the one
whose heart
is open.

She is the one who loves.

She is the one who makes
activism
the most compelling
because she is the one
who is irresistable
her own self.

She is our sister, our teacher, our friend:

Gloria Steinem.

Born 75 years ago
Glorious
To your parents
& still
Radiant
Today.

Happy Birthday, Beloved.
The grand feast
Of your noble Spirit
Has been
& is the cake
that nourishes
Us.

We thank you for your Beauty
& your Being.

Namaste.

Alice Walker

Heel & Toe To The End

Heel& Toe To The End

Gagarin says, in ecstasy, 
he could have
gone on forever

he floated
at and sang
and when he emerged from that

one hundred eight minutes off
the surface of
the earth he was smiling.

Then he returned
to take his place
among the rest of us

from all that division and
subtraction a measure
to and heel

heel and toe he felt
as if he had
been dancing

William Carlos Williams

To Change The World Enough

To Change The World Enough

To change the world enough
you must cease to be afraid
of the poor.
We experience your fear as the least pardonable of
humiliations; in the past
it has sent us scurrying off
daunted and ashamed
into the shadows.
Now,
the world ending
the only one all of us have known
we seek the same
fresh light
you do:
the same high place
and ample table.
The poor always believe
there is room enough
for all of us;
the very rich never seem to have heard
of this.
In us there is wisdom of how to share
loaves and fishes
however few;
we do this everyday.
Learn from us,
we ask you.
We enter now
the dreaded location
of Earth's reckoning;
no longer far
off
or hidden in books
that claim to disclose
revelations;
it is here.
We must walk together without fear.
There is no path without us

Alice Walker

January

January

Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind, 
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.

William Carlos Williams

When You Thought Me Poor

When You Thought Me Poor

When you thought me poor,
my poverty was shaming.
When blackness was unwelcome
we found it best
that I stay home.

When by the miracle
of fierce dreaming and hard work
Life fulfilled our every want
you found me crassly
well off;
not trimly,
inconspicuously wealthy
like your rich friends.

Still black too,
now
I owned too much and too many
of everything.

Woe is me: I became a
success! Blackness, who
knows how? 
Became suddenly
in!

What to do? 
Now that Fate appears
(for the moment anyhow) 
to have dismissed
abject failure
in any case? 
Now that moonlight and night
have blessed me.

Now that the sun
unaffected by criticism
of any sort,
implacably beams
the kiss filled magic that creates
the dark and radiant wonder
of my face.

Alice Walker

Arrival

Arrival

And yet one arrives somehow, 
finds himself loosening the hooks of
her dress
in a strange bedroom--
feels the autumn
dropping its silk and linen leaves
about her ankles.
The tawdry veined body emerges
twisted upon itself
like a winter wind . . .!

William Carlos Williams

You Want To Grow Old Like The Carters

You Want To Grow Old Like The Carters

Let other leaders
Retire
To play golf
& write
Memoirs
About bombing
Villages
They've never seen.

Growing old
Presents a peril
They may not
Expect.

It is to lose
One's soul
In trivia
& irrelevance
The nerve
Endings
Blunted
By the constant
Pressure
Of moral
Indifference.

Growing old
A curse:
Not even
Generally speaking
Able
To relate
To whoever
Shares

Your house. Not the mansion
You inhabit
On the
Lovely stolen hill
Above the sea
Or the interior one:
The darkened
Desolate
Shack.

You want to grow old
Like
The Carters;
Curing blindness
&
Building houses
For
The Poor;

Making friends of those
Who believe
They must fight.

You want to grow old
Like
The Carters
Holding hands
With someone
You love
&
Riding bicycles
Leisurely
Where the ground
Is well known
& perfectly
Flat.

You want to find
And keep to the path
Laid down
Inside you
Such a long time
Ago.

You want to grow old
Like
The Carters:
Serene. Eyes
Twinkling
To be accused
Of
Not getting
It right.

Upfront, upright.
Speaking what to you is true.

A person rich in Mothers.
Beloved.

And:
Honoring what is black
In you.

Alice Walker

Desire

Desire

My desire
is always the same; wherever Life
deposits me:
I want to stick my toe
& soon my whole body
into the water.
I want to shake out a fat broom
& sweep dried leaves
bruised blossoms
dead insects
& dust.
I want to grow
something.
It seems impossible that desire
can sometimes transform into devotion;
but this has happened.
And that is how I've survived:
how the hole
I carefully tended
in the garden of my heart
grew a heart
to fill it.

Alice Walker

Dawn

Dawn

Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings--
beating color up into it
at a far edge,--beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,--
stirring it into warmth, 
quickening in it a spreading change,--
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself--is lifted--
bit by bit above the edge
of things,--runs free at last
out into the open--!lumbering
glorified in full release upward--
songs cease.

William Carlos Williams

Before I Leave the Stage

Before I Leave The Stage

Before I leave the stage
I will sing the only song
I was meant truly to sing.

It is the song
of I AM.
Yes: I am Me
&
You.
WE ARE.

I love Us with every drop
of our blood
every atom of our cells
our waving particles
-undaunted flags of our Being-
neither here nor there.

Alice Walker

Daisy

Daisy

The dayseye hugging the earth
in August, ha! Spring is
gone down in purple, 
weeds stand high in the corn, 
the rainbeaten furrow
is clotted with sorrel
and crabgrass, the
branch is black under
the heavy mass of the leaves--
The sun is upon a
slender green stem
ribbed lengthwise.
He lies on his back--
it is a woman also--
he regards his former
majesty and
round the yellow center, 
split and creviced and done into
minute flowerheads, he sends out
his twenty rays-- a little
and the wind is among them
to grow cool there!

One turns the thing over
in his hand and looks
at it from the rear: brownedged, 
green and pointed scales
armor his yellow.

But turn and turn, 
the crisp petals remain
brief, translucent, greenfastened, 
barely touching at the edges:
blades of limpid seashell.

William Carlos Williams

Be Nobody's Darling

Be Nobody's Darling

Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.
Watch the people succumb
To madness
With ample cheer;
Let them look askance at you
And you askance reply.
Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool) 
Or line the crowded
River beds
With other impetuous
Fools.

Make a merry gathering
On the bank
Where thousands perished
For brave hurt words
They said.

But be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.

Alice Walker

To Elsie

To Elsie

The pure products of America
go crazy--
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure--

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags-succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum-
which they cannot express--

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent--
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs--

some doctor's family, some Elsie--
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us--
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams--To Elsie

I Will Keep Broken Things

I Will Keep Broken Things

I will keep
Broken
Things:
The big clay
Pot
With raised
Iguanas
Chasing
Their
Tails;
Two
Of their
Wise

Heads
Sheared
Off;

I will keep
Broken
things:
The old
Slave
Market
Basket
Brought
To my
Door

By Mississippi
A jagged
Hole
Gouged
In its sturdy
Dark
Oak
Side.

I will keep
Broken
things:
The memory
Of
Those
Long
Delicious
Nig ht
Swims
With
You;

I will keep
Broken
things:
In my house
There
Remains
An

Honored
Shelf
On which
I will
Keep
Broken
Things.

Their beauty
Is
They
Need
Not
Ever
Be
'fixed.'

I will keep
Your
Wild
Free
Laughter
Thoug h
It is now
Missing
Its
Reassuring
And
Gra ceful
Hinge.

I will keep
Broken
Things:

Thank you
So much!

I will keep
Broken
Things.

I will keep
You:

Pilgrim
Of
Sorrow.
I will keep
Myself.

Alice Walker

Alice Walker, Broken Things

When Golda Meir was in Africa

When Golda Meir was in Africa

When Golda Meir
Was in Africa
She shook out her hair
And combed it
Everywhere she went.

According to her autobiography
Africans loved this.
In Russia, Minneapolis, London, Washington, D.C.,
Germany, Palestine, Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem
She never combed at all.
There was no point. In those
Places people said, "She looks like
Any other aging grandmother. She looks
Like a troll. Let's sell her cookery
And guns."
"Kreplach your cookery," said Golda.
Only in Africa could she finally
Settle down and comb her hair.
The children crept up and stroked it,
And she felt beautiful.
Such wonderful people, Africans
Childish, arrogant, self-indulgent, pompous,
Cowardly and treacherous-a great disappointment
To Israel, of course, and really rather
Ridiculous in international affairs
But, withal, opined Golda, a people of charm
And good taste.

Written by Alice Walker

http://www.afropoets.net/alicewalker.html

A Sort Of A Song

by William Carlos Williams

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

Alice Walker Biography

Alice Walker (February 9, 1944 - Present) 

 

Alice Malsenior Walker is an American author and activist. She wrote the critically acclaimed novelThe Color Purple for which she won the National Book Award. She is married to Melvyn Leventhal (m. 1967–1976)

 

She received the following awards: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, National Book Award for Fiction (Hardcover), Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & CanadaMore

Movies: The Color Purple, Fierce Light, Fidel: The Untold Story, Jennifer Berezan: Praises for the World

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Walker

Biography of William Carlos Williams

 

 William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883-March 4, 1963)

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine with a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

 

His Awards included: United States Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, National Book Award for Poetry, Bollingen Prize, American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for PoetryMore

His Education include: University of Pennsylvania (1902–1906), Perelman School of Medicine, Horace Mann School, Lycée Condorcet

His Nominations: National Book Award for Fiction, National Book Award for Nonfiction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams