Eulogy

By Sonia Sanchez

For a long time, I've pondered this thing that we do called writing. I've looked at my words sometimes as if they belonged to a stranger. But each time I teach GWENDOLYN BROOKS, each time I revisit her poems, her words, they climb up on my knees and sit in tight contentment. They speak to me of form and color, patterns and dawns. They talk of myths; they tell me where the flesh lives; where a troop of young heroes and sheroes lean back in chairs, "beautiful. Impudent. Ready for life." Where the young "live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along." I never have to ask where are the flowers? Sun? Where are the mothers? Fathers? Where are the old marrieds? Where are the children, "adjudged the leastwise of the land"? Where are the riots? Where are the prophets? Where is the sound "that we are each other's harvest"? I see them in her poems that breathe women in a blaze of upsweeps and backyards and ballads, in her children dancing between urine and violets, in her singing to us between the sleeping and the waking. And as she entered into our 21st century bloodstream, paddling a river of risks, she became the color of bells, set sail on the wind and sailed home. Said hello to our own goodbyes.

--Sonia Sanchez, author of Shake Loose My Skin