In The Poetry

For a whole race of people freed from slavery with nothing – without money, without work, without education – it has not always been easy to hold fast to dreams. But the negro people believed in the American Dream. Now, since almost a hundred years of freedom, we’ve come a long ways but there’s still [...]

Many of my poems have been about the history of the Negro people. In this poem, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, I try to link, in terms of the rivers we have known, Africa, the land of our ancestors, and America, our land today.

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than [...]