"Kinfolk and Community” – Theme for Week #2, April 8 thru April 14
DevotionReader Series: 30 Ways of Looking at Black Poetry
Jessie Mitchell’s Mother – Gwendolyn Brooks
Into her mother’s bedroom to wash the ballooning body.
“My mother is jelly-hearted and she has a brain of jelly: Sweet, quiver-soft, irrelevant. Not essential. Only a habit would cry if she should die.A pleasant sort of fool without the least iron. . . .Are you better, mother, do you think it will come today?” The stretched yellow rag that was Jessie Mitchell’s mother Reviewed her. Young, and so thin, and so straight. So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her. But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men, Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over, And the rest of things in life that were for poor women, Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill. Comparisons shattered her heart, ate at her bulwarks: The shabby and the bright: she, almost hating her daughter, Crept into an old sly refuge: “Jessie’s black And her way will be black, and jerkier even than mine. Mine, in fact, because I was lovely, had flowers Tucked in the jerks, flowers were here and there. . . .” She revived for the moment settled and dried-up triumphs, Forced perfume into old petals, pulled up the droop, Refueled Triumphant long-exhaled breaths. Her exquisite yellow youth. . . .
Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems, Blacks, 1991, 1987
Devotionreader.com 30 Days of Looking at Black Poetry -- Day: One O Black and Unknown Bards Two Listen Children Three For the Record Four Ballad of Birmingham Five Six The Idea of Ancestry Seven I Want to Write Eight A Grandfather Poem Nine Sweet Sound Ten My Brother is Homemade Eleven Those Winter Sundays Twelve SOS Thirteen Resurrections Fourteen Jessie Mitchell's Mother Fifteen April Rain Song Sixteen I've Got A Home in that Rock Seventeen Earth Screaming Eighteen Returning Spring Nineteen Newark, for Now [68] Twenty Dawn Twenty-One Fir Twenty-Two Comin Strong Twenty-Three From a Black Feminists Conference Reflections on Margaret Walker: Poet Twenty-Four My Africa Twenty-Five Strong Men Twenty-Six Today's News Twenty-Seven My Guilt Twenty-Eight Forward, Always Forward Twenty-Nine The Seven Principles of Kwanzaa Thirty What Harriet Said
