Anne Spencer – Requiem

Oh, I who so wanted to own some earth,

Am consumed by the earth instead:

Blood into river

Bone into land

The grave restores what finds its bed.

Oh, I who did drink of Spring’s fragrant clay,

Give back its wine for other men:

Breath into air

Heart into grass

My heart bereft — I might rest then.

Anne Spencer – Taboo

Being a Negro Woman is the world’s most exciting

game of “Taboo”: By hell there is nothing you can

do that you want to do and by heaven you are

going to do it anyhow —

We do not climb into the jim crow galleries

of scenario houses we stay away and read

I read garden and seed catalogs, Browning,

Housman, Whitman, Saturday Evening Post

detective tales, Atlantic Monthly, American

Mercury, Crisis, Opportunity, Vanity Fair,

Hibberts Journal, oh, anything.

I can cook delicious things to eat. . .

we have a lovely home—one that

money did not buy—it was born and evolved

slowly out of our passionate, poverty-

stricken agony to own our own home.

Happiness.