42 Poems of the Week
~ Black poets ~
42 Poems of the Week
~ Black poets ~
for MLK Day, 2024
Major Jackson – How to Listen
Kwame Dawes – Coffee Break
E. Ethelbert Miller - The Things in Black Men’s Closets
Audre Lorde – Movement Song
Toi Derricotte – Black Boys Play the Classics
Langston Hughes – Harlem
Hanif Abdurraqib - I Don’t Remember The Whole Summer When “Do The Right Thing” Dropped
Jericho Brown – The Tradition
Lucille Clifton – won’t you celebrate with me
Parneshia Jones – My Mother and Lucille Clifton Have Tea
Danez Smith – Dinosaurs in the Hood
Tamara Oakman – There Will Be No Babies
Terrence Hayes – Ode to Big Trend
Etheridge Knight - Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane
Morgan Parker – If You Are Over Staying Woke
Saeed Jones – Alive at the End of the World
June Jordan - Democracy Poem #1
Allison Joseph – Untethered
Langston Hughes – I, Too
June Jordan – In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Donte Collins – they need some of us to die
Rasheed Copeland – When Puffy says, and we won’ t stop, 'cause we can’ t stop.
Natasha Trethewey – Theories of Time and Space
Nikki Giovanni – The Laws of Motion
Afaa Michael Weaver – American Income
Reginald Dwayne Betts – Blood History
Aracelis Girmay – Arroz Poetica
Khadijah Queen – Disposed
Samiya Bashir – You’re really faithful to your abusers, aren’t you?
Gwendolyn Brooks – A Sunset of the City
Danez Smith – Tonight, in Oakland
Frank X Walker – Chest of Drawers
Phillip B. Williams – Of Darker Ceremonies
Wanda Coleman – The Saturday Afternoon Blues
Countee Cullen – To the Swimmer
Amiri Baraka – Incident
Major Jackson – On Disappearing
Danez Smith – juxtaposing the black boy & the bullet
Angelo Geter – Praise
Camille T. Dungy – In her mostly white town, an hour from Rocky Mountain National Park, a black poet considers centuries of protests against racialized violence
Robert Hayden – Frederick Douglass
Maya Angelou – Still I Rise