GWENDOLYN BROOKS
"Gay Chaps at the Bar"

____________________

... and guys I knew in the States, young officers, return from the front crying and trembling. Gay chaps at the bar in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York ...
—Lt. William Couch in the South Pacific

We knew how to order. Just the dash
Necessary. The length of gaiety in good taste.
Whether the raillery should be slightly iced
And given green, or served up hot and lush.
And we knew beautifully how to give to women
The summer spread, the tropics of our love.
When to persist, or hold a hunger off.
Knew white speech. How to make a look an omen.
But nothing ever taught us to be islands.
And smart, athletic language for this hour
Was not in the curriculum. No stout
Lesson showed how to chat with death. We brought
No brass fortissimo, among our talents,
To holler down the lions in this air.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS
"The Boy Died in My Alley"

          to Running Boy

The Boy died in my alley
without my Having Known.
Policeman said, next morning,
"Apparently died Alone."

"You heard a shot?" Policeman said.
Shots I hear and Shots I hear.
I never see the Dead.

The Shot that killed him yes I heard
as I heard the Thousand shots before;
careening tinnily down the nights
across my years and arteries.

Policeman pounded on my door.
"Who is it?" "POLICE!" Policeman yelled.
"A Boy was dying in your alley.
A Boy is dead, and in your alley.
And have you known this Boy before?"

I have known this Boy before.
I have known this boy before, who ornaments my alley.
I never saw his face at all.
I never saw his futurefall.
But I have known this Boy.

I have always heard him deal with death.
I have always heard the shout, the volley.
I have closed my heart-ears late and early.
And I have killed him ever.

I joined the Wild and killed him
with knowledgeable unknowing.
I saw where he was going.
I saw him Crossed. And seeing,
I did not take him down.

He cried not only "Father!"
but "Mother!
Sister!
Brother."
The cry climbed up the alley.
It went up to the wind.
It hung upon the heaven
for a long
stretch-strain of Moment.

The red floor of my alley
is a special speech to me.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS - "A Sunset of the City"

     Kathleen Eileen

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite 
And night is night.

It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer 
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.

It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone. 
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.

It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes. 
I am aware there is winter to heed. 
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.
I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs. 
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.

Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my 
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief, 
And small communion with the master shore. 
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin, 
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry 
In humming pallor or to leap and die.

Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS - "The Lovers of the Poor"

arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting 
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting 
Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear; 
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.
Cutting with knives served by their softest care, 
Served by their love, so barbarously fair.
Whose mothers taught: You’d better not be cruel! 
You had better not throw stones upon the wrens! 
Herein they kiss and coddle and assault 
Anew and dearly in the innocence 
With which they baffle nature. Who are full, 
Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, a-glow, all 
Sweetly abortive, hinting at fat fruit, 
Judge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt 
Beneath the lovelier planes of enterprise. 
To resurrect. To moisten with milky chill. 
To be a random hitching-post or plush.
To be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem.
                        Their guild is giving money to the poor.
The worthy poor. The very very worthy
And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?
perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim 
Nor—passionate. In truth, what they could wish
Is—something less than derelict or dull.
Not staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze!
God shield them sharply from the beggar-bold! 
The noxious needy ones whose battle’s bald 
Nonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down.
                        But it’s all so bad! and entirely too much for them.
The stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans,
Dead porridges of assorted dusty grains,
The old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they’re told,
Something called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn
Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs. 
The soil that looks the soil of centuries.
And for that matter the general oldness. Old 
Wood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old.
Not homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe.
Nothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic,
There is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no 
Unkillable infirmity of such
A tasteful turn as lately they have left, 
Glencoe, Lake Forest, and to which their cars 
Must presently restore them. When they’re done
With dullards and distortions of this fistic
Patience of the poor and put-upon.
                        They’ve never seen such a make-do-ness as 
Newspaper rugs before! In this, this “flat,” 
Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich 
Rugs of the morning (tattered! the bespattered. . . .) 
Readies to spread clean rugs for afternoon. 
Here is a scene for you. The Ladies look, 
In horror, behind a substantial citizeness 
Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart. 
Who, arms akimbo, almost fills a door.
All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor 
And tortured thereover, potato peelings, soft-
Eyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt.
                        Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost. 
But to put their clean, their pretty money, to put 
Their money collected from delicate rose-fingers 
Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems . . .
                        They own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra, 
Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks, 
Turtle soup, Chippendale, red satin “hangings,” 
Aubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter 
In Palm Beach; cross the Water in June; attend, 
When suitable, the nice Art Institute;
Buy the right books in the best bindings; saunter 
On Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind. 
Oh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre 
With fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings 
Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers 
So old old, what shall flatter the desolate? 
Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling
And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage 
Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames 
And, again, the porridges of the underslung
And children children children. Heavens! That
Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long
And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies’ 
Betterment League agree it will be better
To achieve the outer air that rights and steadies,
To hie to a house that does not holler, to ring
Bells elsetime, better presently to cater
To no more Possibilities, to get
Away. Perhaps the money can be posted.
Perhaps they two may choose another Slum!
Some serious sooty half-unhappy home!—
Where loathe-love likelier may be invested.
                        Keeping their scented bodies in the center 
Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall, 
They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,
Are off at what they manage of a canter,
And, resuming all the clues of what they were,
Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.