To A Dark GirlI love you for your brownness,
And the rounded darkness of your breast,
I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice
And shadows where your wayward eyelids rest.
Something of old forgotten queens
Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk
And something of the shackled slave
Sobs in the rhythm of your talk.
Oh, little brown girl, born for sorrow’s mate,
Keep all you have of the queenliness,
Forgetting that you once were slave,
And let your full lips laugh at fate
- Gwendolyn Bennett
White Things
Most things are colorful things – they sky, earth and sea.
Black men are most men; but the white are free!
White things are rare things; so rare, so rare
They stole from out a silvered world—somewhere.Finding earth-plains fair plains, save greenly grassed,
They strewed white feathers of cowardice, as they passed
They golden stars with lances fine
The hills all red and darkened pine,
They blanched with their wand of power;
And turned the blood in a ruby rose
To a poor white poppy-flower.
They pyred a race of black, black men,
Laughing, A young one claimed a skull,
For the skull of a black is white, not dull,
But a glistening awful thing;
Made, it seems, for this ghoul to swing
And swear by the hell that sired him:
“Man-maker, make white!
- Anne Bethel Spencer
