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Walker begins the volume with two poems in which the speakers are young children; one eight-year-old demonstrator eagerly waits to be arrested with her group in the fight for equality, and a second one is already jailed and wants no bail.
- For My People
- Sorrow Home
- Southern Song
- Dark Blood
- Love Song For Alex, 1979
- Lineage
- For Malcolm X
- Childhood
- The Struggle Staggers Us
- I Want to Write
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power; For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cookin...
My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weaned in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf, mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know me. Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong with the smell of fresh pine, with the trail of coon, and the spring growt...
I want my body bathed again by southern suns, my soul reclaimed again from southern land. I want to rest again in southern fields, in grass and hay and clover bloom; to lay my hand again upon the clay baked by a southern sun, to touch the rain-soaked earth and smell the smell of soil … 1. Full text of “Southern Song” 2. Analysis of “Southern Song” ...
There were bizarre beginnings in old lands for the making of me. There were sugar sands and islands of fern and pearl, palm jungles and stretches of a never-ending sea. There were the wooing nights of tropical lands and the cool discretion of flowering plains between two stalwart hills. They nurtured my coming with wanderlust. I sucked fevers of ad...
My monkey-wrench man is my sweet patootie; the lover of my life, my youth and age. My heart belongs to him and to him only; the children of my flesh are his and bear his rage Now grown to years advancing through the dozens the honeyed kiss, the lips of wine and fire fade blissfully into the distant years of yonder … 1. Full text of “Love Song for A...
My grandmothers were strong. They followed plows and bent to toil. They moved through fields sowing seed. They touched earth and grain grew. They were full of sturdiness and singing. My grandmothers were strong … 1. Full text of “Lineage” 2. Analysis of “Lineage” (from This is My Century: New and Collected Poems,1989) . . . . . . . . . .
All you violated ones with gentle hearts; You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak; Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers, And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes. All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie, Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns, Gather round ...
When I was a child I knew red miners dressed raggedly and wearing carbide lamps. I saw them come down red hills to their camps dyed with red dust from old Ishkooda mines. Night after night I met them on the roads, or on the streets in town I caught their glance; the swing of dinner buckets in their hands, and grumbling undermining all their words …...
Our birth and death are easy hours, like sleep and food and drink. The struggle staggers us for bread, for pride, for simple dignity. And this is more than fighting to exist; more than revolt and war and human odds. There is a journey from the me to you. There is a journey from the you to me. A union of the two strange worlds must be. Ours is a str...
I want to write I want to write the songs of my people. I want to hear them singing melodies in the dark. I want to catch the last floating strains from their sob-torn throats. I want to frame their dreams into words; their souls into notes … 1. Full text of “I Want to Write” 2. Analysis of “I Want to Write” (From October Journey, 1973) . . . . . ....
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power;
Walker's poetry often draws on African American history and folklore, using traditional forms like the ballad and the sonnet, while infusing them with a modern sensibility. Her most acclaimed work, the poem "For My People," celebrates the resilience and strength of Black people throughout history.
Margaret Walker's signature poem "For My People" encompasses the strengths and struggles of Blacks not only in Chicago but throughout America. Need a transcript of this...
Nov 6, 2023 · Margaret Walker’s poem addresses marginalized and disenfranchised people and endeavors to show the light that exists within and despite their lives. Walker’s parents were university-educated Southerners; her grandmother told her stories about her own mother’s “slavery time” at Walker’s urging.
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'For My People' is one of the most notable poems of Margaret Walker. It won her the Yale Series of Younger Poets Awards and enabled her to make her mark in the community of worldwide poets as an activist and advocator for equality between whites and blacks.
