PATENT LEATHER

That cool chick down on Calumet
Has got herself a brand new cat,
With pretty patent leather hair.
And he is man enough for her.

Us other guys don't think he's such
A much.
His voice is shrill.
His muscle is pitiful.

That cool chick down on Calumet,
Though, says he's really "it."
And strokes the patent leather hair
That makes him man enough for her.

THE BALLAD OF CHOCOLATE MABBIE

It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates.
And Mabbie was all of seven.
And Mabbie was cut from a chocolate bar.
And Mabbie thought life was heaven.

The grammar school gates were the pearly gates.
For Willie Boone went to school.
When she sat by him in history class,
Was only her eyes were cool.

It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates
Waiting for Willie Boone.
Half hour after the closing bell!
He would surely be coming soon.

Oh, warm is the waiting for joys, my dears!
And it cannot be too long.
Oh, pity the little poor chocolate lips
That carry the bubble of song!

Out came the saucily bold Willie Boone.
It was woe for our Mabbie now.
He wore like a jewel a lemon-hued lynx
With sand waves loving her brow.

It was Mabbie alone by the grammar school gates;
Yet chocolate companions had she.
Mabbie on Mabbie with hush in the heart.
Mabbie on Mabbie to be.

(over)

from AMERICAN WAR DIARY

I

The slayer hurries past me, or the slain,
With warm unwary mouth and asking eyes
Wide open, full of vagueness and surprise
And hunger and acidulent disdain.
Jaunty the attitude. How very plain
(One knows of course that mostly youth relies
On ha-ha what-the-hell and cracking wise)
That jaunty to the end it will remain.
The streets are busy, killers out today
Enjoy the sunshine with the rest of us.
And mixed among, what sad assassin's prey,
What victim of a puzzled blunderbuss? ......
But go on home and put your wraps away.
Peel your potatoes, make the usual fuss.

VII

This is the type of time in which love blooms.
Cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face
All unashamed. And sways in wicked grace.
Because of such an ebony that looms.
The backs of autos, and the easy rooms.
The virgins buying lingerie of lace.
The virgins murmuring, "Find a quiet place."
The virgins wincing as the airplane zooms.
And wily wives from sweet prohibited arms
Still hugging close the theft of crimson joy.
This is the type of time in which there goes
Love naked to the thighs, spending her charms.
Virtue's a jest; convention is a toy.
(Love naked, naked, even to the toes!)

V

There's not a rose that grows as red as blood.
So tell me of no roses any more.
Forget the pretty promise of the bud.
It never giggled, did it? Could it snore?
Could it whip out bright anger at a friend?
Bound breathless up the startled steps to meet
Love waiting? Could it whistle? Could it spend
A last dime on a movie or a sweet?
Too bad it had to die before it came
Into the lushness of its legacy.
But other buds are dead. With more to blame
Than cruelty of frost or childish glee.
And more to mourn -- you may believe me, sir --
Than thwarted bee and thwarted gardener.

(over)

THE BALLAD OF PEARL MAY LEE

Then off they took you, off to the jail,
A hundred hooting after.
And you should have heard me at my house.
I cut my lungs with my laughter,
Laughter,
Laughter.
I cut my lungs with my laughter.

They dragged you into a dusty cell.
And a rat was in the corner.
And what was I doing? Laughing still.
Though never was a poor gal lorner,
Lorner,
Lorner.
Though never was a poor gal lorner.

The sheriff, he peeped in through the bars.
And the red old thing he told you,
"You son of a bitch, you're going to hell!"
'Cause you wanted white arms to enfold you.
Enfold you,
Enfold you.
'Cause you wanted white arms to enfold you.

But you paid for your white arms, Sammy boy,
And you didn't pay with money.
You paid with your hide and my heart, Sammy boy,
For your taste of pink and white honey,
Honey,
Honey.
For your taste of pink and white honey.

Oh, dig me out of my don't-despair.
Pull me out of my poor-me.
Get me a garment of red to wear.
You had it coming surely,
Surely,
Surely.

You had it coming surely.

At school your girls were the bright little girls.
You couldn't abide dark meat.
Yellow was for to look at,
Black for the famished to eat.
Yellow was for to look at,
Black for the famished to eat.

You grew up with bright skins on the brain,
And me in your black folks' bed.
Often and often you cut me cold,
And often I wished you dead.
Often and often you cut me cold.
Often I wished you dead.

Then ---

A white girl passed you by one day,
And the vixen, she gave you the wink.
And your stomach got sick and your legs liquefied
And you thought till you couldn't think.
You thought,
You thought,
You thought till you couldn't think.

I fancy you out on the fringe of town,
The moon an owl's eye minding,
The sweet and thick of the cricket-belled dark ....
The fire within you winding,
Winding,
Winding ....
The fire within you winding.

Say, she was white like milk, though, wasn't she?
And her breasts were cups of cream.
In the back of her Buick you drank your fill.
Then she roused you out of your dream.
In the back of her Buick you drank your fill.
Then she roused you out of your dream.

"You raped me, nigger," she softly said.
(The shame was threading through.)
"You raped me, nigger. And what the hell
Do you think I'm going to do?
What the hell,
What the hell
Do you think I'm going to do?

"I'll tell every white man in this town.
I'll tell them all of my sorrow.
You got my body tonight, nigger boy.
I'll get your body tomorrow,
Tomorrow,
Tomorrow.
I'll get your body tomorrow."

And my glory but Sammy, she did, she did!
And they stole you out of the jail.
They wrapped you around a cottonwood tree.
And they laughed when they heard you wail.
Laughed,
Laughed,
They laughed when they heard you wail.

And I was laughing, down at my house.
Laughing fit to kill.
You got what you wanted for dinner,
But brother you paid the bill.
Brother,
Brother,
Brother you paid the bill.

## THE FUNERAL

To whatever you incline, your final choice here must be handling
Occasional sweet cliches with a dishonesty of deft tact.

For these people are stricken, they want none of your long-range messages,
Only the sweet cliches, to pamper them, modify fright.

Many friends have sent flowers, clubs have been kind with sprays,
Wreaths. The flowers provide a kind of heat. Sick

Thick odor-loveliness winds nicely about the shape of mourning,
A dainty horror. People think of flowers upon rot --

And for moments together the corpse is no colder than they.

They glance at each other, want love from each other:

Or they do not glance but out of tight eyes vaguely pray.

Preacher and tradition of piety and propriety rise. The people wait
For the dear blindfold: "Heaven is good denied.

Rich are the men who have died."

Gwendolyn Brooks

## DEATH OF THE DINOSAUR

They are done, the days of easy and dank food.

And the dinosaur, who crashed with his companions

Through the moist goodnesses, looks out of eyeballs

Painted with fear. The last shred of his race.

The odorous mounds of his parched companions are here

And not even this dim brain can longer insist on escape.

The dust is golden but drier than ever, the

Wide cruel glory envelops the dinosaur

And he walks without wisdom. -- But what is wisdom now? --

His life was big and booming, and he dies

A big and booming, terribly dry death,

Dropping a notice with his marvelous bulk.

Who will read it with enlarging eyes?

One man, while nine watch the dinosaurs of our day

Rot and begin to crumble in the dry time,

Themselves to be choked by the grains of decay.

Nine men who Wait -- willing not to adjust

Dust to themselves but themselves dismally to dust.

Gwendolyn Brooks

## TO THEODORE WARD

the man with the orderly mind

What do you think of us in fuzzy endeavor, you whose directions are sterling, whose stride
is straight?

Can you make a reason, how can you pardon us who memorize the rules and never score?

Who memorize the rules from your own text but never quite transfer them to the game,

Who never quite receive the whistling ball, who gawk, begin to absorb the crowd's own roar.

Where find our physic? is earnestness enough? may earnestness attract, or lead to, light?

Is light enough, if hands in clumsy frenzy, flimsy whimsicality engage;

Is light enough, when this bewilderment crying against the dark shuts down the shades?

We envy, but our sight of strength to envy

Calms no confusion, settles no vague rage.

G.B.

OBITUARY FOR A LIVING LADY

My friend was decently wild

As a child.

And as a young girl

She was interested in a brooch and pink powder and a curl.

As a young woman though

She fell in love with a man who didn't know

That even if she wouldn't let him touch her breasts she was still worth his hours,
Stopped calling Sundays with flowers.

Sunday after Sunday she put on her clean, gay (though white) dress,

Worried the windows. There was so much silence she finally decided that the next
time she would say "yes."

But the man had found by then a woman who dressed in red.

My friend spent a hundred weeks or so wishing she were dead.

But crying for yourself, when you give it all of your time, gets tedious after a while.

Therefore she terminated her mourning, made for her mouth a sad sweet smile

And discovered the country of God. Now she will not dance

And she thinks not the thinnest thought of any type of romance

And I can't get her to take a touch of the best cream cologne.

However even without lipstick she is lovely and it is no wonder that the preacher
(at present) is almost a synonym for her telephone

And watches the neutral kind bland eyes that moisten the first pew center on Sunday --
-- I beg your pardon -- Sabbath nights

And wonders as his stomach breaks up into fire and lights

How long it will be

Before he can, with reasonably slight risk of rebuke, put his hand on her knee.

Gwendolyn Brooks

KATYN WOOD

September.

Indelible faces turned up to a morning
As beautiful as spring.

This is Katyn, final forest.

The actors align themselves,
Fingers steel to deliver steel;

Guns unemotional and non-partisan rehearse
Their angry arias.

The quick conscienceless bullet invades,
Anonymous men die with colossal ease.
Curled acrid air lonely where they stood.

Hypnotic guns, victorious, move away
And all the court, flanking their metal majesty,
Walks with stiff step and hollow eye.

Who dug these pits,
Peopled them with death?

We have exhumed you. We are not proud.

The wind moves over you and sickens us.

The wind plays with you -- examines your rags.

Worms salvage our society,

These pits are impasse to our science.

Henry Blakely

MEDGAR EVERS

-- Uwendolyn Brooks

The man whose height his fear improved he
arranged to fear no further. The raw
intoxicated time was time for better birth or
a final death.

Old styles, old tempos, all the engagement of the
day -- the sedate, the regulated fray --
the antique light, the Moral rose, old gusts,
tight whistlings from the past, the mothballs
in the Love at last our man forswore.

Medgar Evers annoyed confetti and assorted
brands of businessmen's eyes.

The shows came down: to maxims and surprise.
And palsy.

Roaring no rapt arise-ye to the dead he
leaned across tomorrow. People said that
he was holding clean globes in his hands.

(to be published in
"CHICAGO", June, 1964.)

Of dusty rose and brown with little white splashes,
White curls; a vendor tidily encased;
Young yellow waiter moving with straight haste,
Old oaken waiter, lolling and amused;
Some paper napkins in a water glass;
Table, initialed, rubbed, as a desk in school.
They stare. They tire. They feel refused,
Feel overwhelmed by subtle treasons;
Nobody here will take the part of jester.
The absolute stutters, and the rationale
Stops off in astonishment.
But not gaily,
And not with their consent.
They play "They All Say I'm The Biggest Fool"
And "Voo Me On The Vot Nay" and "New Lester
Leaps In" and "For Sentimental Reasons."
But how shall they tell people they have been
Out Bronzeville way? For all the nickels in
Have not bought savagery or defined a "folk."
The colored people will not "clown."
The colored people arrive, sit firmly down,
Eat their Express Spaghetti, their T-bone steak,
Handling their steel and crockery with no clatter,
Laugh punily, rise, go firmly out of the door.

Gwendolyn Brooks

# THE BEAN EATERS

## by
Gwendolyn Brooks

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,

As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.