As A Poet And Writer, I Deeply

We Need Everybody And All That We Are. We Need To Know And Make Known The Complete, Constantly Unfolding, Complicated Heritage That Is Our Black Experience. We Should Absolutely Resist The Superstar, One At A Time Mentality That Threatens The Varied And Resilient, Flexible Wealth Of Our Black Future.

Sometimes We Become So Sophisticated We Have To Read The New York Times In Order To Figure Out Whether It's A Hot Or A Rainy Day.

To Rescue Our Children We Will Have To Let Them Save Us From The Power We Embody: We Will Have To Trust The Very Difference That They Forever Personify.

When We Heard About The Hippies, The Barely More Than Boys And Girls Who Decided To Try Something Different ... We Laughed At Them. We Condemned Them, Our Children, For Seeking A Different Future. We Hated Them For Their Flowers, For Their Love, And For Their Unmistakable Rejection Of Every Hideous, Mistaken Compromise That We Had Made Throughout Our Hollow, Money-bitten, Frightened, Adult Lives

Poetry Is A Political Act Because It Involves Telling The Truth.