My Mom

My mom's name is Janet Lee,
She is very important to me
She decided to have me in the first place,
She's the real reason for the nose on my face.

She listens to me when I'm a nervous wreck,
It seems she is always writing me checks,
She's patient with me when I fail all my tests,
even when i failed my temps

Everynight she cooks a meal,
No matter how sick she might feel
She takes our clothes and makes them clean,
She deserves to be treated like a queen.

By Hillary Renker

My Tribe

My tribe wears jerseys, and socks, and tennis shoes
My tribe eats energy bars, and gatorade, and water.
My tribe listens to a warm up tape, and balls bouncing, and the stop clock buzzer.
My tribe drives to different schools, gyms, and courts.
My tribe goes to the gym to practice and play
In my trive we like to dribble, shoot and play.
My tribe is from Strongsville where the mustangs roam.
-Hillary Renker

Mirror By Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pin, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she was drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath wrote openly and honestly about the reality of her life. Her poems read liek confessions that exposed their troubled lives.

The Language of Literature. McDougall Littel,

Life for My Child is Simple By Gwendolyn Brooks

Life for my child is simple, and is good.
He knows his wish. Yes, but that is not all.
Because I know mine too.
And we both want joy of undeep and unabiding things,
Like kicking over a chair or throwing blocks out of a window
Or tipping over an ice box pan
Or snatching down curtains or fingering an electric outlet
Or a journey or a friend or an illegal kiss.
No. There is more to it than that.
It is that he has never been afraid.
Rather, he reaches out and lo the chair falls with a beautiful crash,
And the blocks fall, down on the people's heads,
And the water comes slooshing sloppily out across the floor.
And so forth.
Not that success, for him, is sure, infallible.
But never has he been afraid to reach.
His lesions are legion.
But reaching is his rule.

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the effects of racism and poverty.

The Language of Literature. McDougall Littel,

Any Human to Another By Countee Cullen

The ills I sorrow at
Not me alone
Like an arrow,
Pierce to the marrow,
Through the fat
And past the bone.

Your grief and mine
Must intertwine
Like sea and river,
Be fused and mingle,
Diverse yet single,
Forever and forever.

Let no man be so proud
And confident,
To think he is allowed
A little tent
Pitched in a meadow
Of sun and shadow
All his little own.

Joy may be shy, unique,
Friendly to a few,
Sorrow never scorned to speak
To any who
Were false or true.

Your every frief
Like a blade
Shining and unsheathed

Must strike me down.
Of bitter aloes wreathed,
My sorrow must be laid
On your head like a crown

Countee Cullen was born in 1903. He was influenced by the English romantic poets. He taught french.

A Black Man Talks of Reaping By Arna Bontemps

I have sown beside all waters in my day.
I planted deep, within my heart the fear
That wind or fowl would take the grain away.
I planted safe against this stark, lean year.

I scattered seed enough to plant the land
In rows from Canada to Mexico,
But for my reaping only what the hand
Can hold at once is all that I can show.

Yet what i sowed and what the orchard yields
My brother's sons are gathering stalk and root,
Small wonder then my children glean in fields
They have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit.

Arna Bontemps was born on October 13th, 1902 in Louisiana. He had a teaching position in Harlem.

The Language of Literature. McDougall Littel,

I, Too By Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother,
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed-

I, too, am America


The Language of Literature. McDougall Littel,