Hold Fast

I remember how I first discovered poetry. At about seven, I chanced upon Langston Hughes' Dreams. I don’t recall that I had yet begun to dream dreams, but I understood the power of a dream having just read King’s Dream speech from a volume of the Negro Heritage Library my Nana had given me. I looked out of my bedroom window at the frozen New Jersey landscape. I knew that when I began to dream dreams, I would hold fast.

The Black Poets edited by Dudley Randall was one of many books my mother arranged aesthetically on my bookcase. Within its pages, I found Randall’s Ballad of Birmingham. It frightened me and sent me once again to those volumes of the Negro Heritage Library that my grandmother had given me. It somehow made the historical photos, with their brief captions, more assessable to me. I’d read the history, but the poem whispered to the inside of me. And, it was then that I began to trust poetry to tell me the whole, unabridged truth about the world and about me.

The poems in Randall’s anthology seemed to somehow soften Margaret Jablonski’s taunts of Tarzan leading tribal Africans. She insisted all blacks came from “black, black Africa’ and that was where I belonged. Those poems in The Black Poets showed me that blackness (and me, by extension) was more beautifully layered and complex than either Margaret or I imagined.

As I prepare for the release of my debut collection of poetry, Psalm of the Sunflower, it is apropos that, I again think about discovery and identity through poetry. All grown-up now, a woman in the South for the better part of thirty years, I have measured myself by what are sometimes very strict and conservative social mores. A failed marriage and the resulting single parenthood was a painful induction into a realm of unreturned phone calls, un-invitations and social anonymity. It was cause for prayer and the cause of poverty. However, my divorce after fifteen years of marriage and three kids, created an opportunity not to recreate myself, but to self-actualize – to, as Walcott would say, “love again the stranger who was your self.” Writing the book showed me again that poetry could tell me the whole, unabridged truth about the world, about me and about me in the world. My poetry taught me to dream dreams. And, as I learned so long ago, "to hold fast."

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Langston Hughes