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Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the MorningAuthor(s): Alice WalkerSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, Black Writing (Spring, 1975), pp. 2-3Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20158349 .
Accessed: 13/06/2014 13:49
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I was a boy then, running
(unbeknownst to Pa) errands for Miss Jackie and Stack-o'-Diamonds' Eula Mae.
.. . Their perfumes,
rouged Egyptian faces.
Their pianolas jazzing.
O Creole babies, Dixie odalisques,
speeding through cutglass dark to see the macho angel
trick you'd never
turn, his bluesteel prowess in the ring.
Hardshell beHevers
amen'd the wreck
as God A'mighty's will. I'd thought
such gaiety could not
die. Nor could our
elegant avenger.
The Virgin Forest
by Rousseau
its psychedelic flowers
towering, its deathless
dark dream-figure death the leopard
claws?I choose it
now as elegy for Tiger Flowers.
"Good Night, Willie Lee, 111 See You in the
Morning" / Alice Walker
Looking down into my father's
dead face
for the last time
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my mother said without
tears, without smiles
without regrets but with civiHty "Good night, WilHe Lee, 1*11 see you in the morning."
And it was then I knew that the healing of all our wounds
is forgiveness that permits a promise of our return
at the end.
Leaving Eden / Ralph A. Dickey
Named and unnamed and renamed
armed and unarmed and disarmed
I have my covenant outside the womb
in the solitary confinement of my cells
The cries of my bones
like the cries of animals
followed me out of my mother
into exile
Butterfly Piece / Robert Hayden (for Robert Stilwell)
BraziHan butterflies, static and perfect as
enamelwork by Faberg?. Jewel corpses fixed in glass. Black opal flower-skin banded
neargold yellow; sea-agate striped berylgreen:
Colors so intense I imagine them heavy enough to have broken the Kve wings?as human
colors in our inhuman world burden, break.
Occult prismatic blue of the morpho, the great prized morpho that Hving seems
conjured up by magic hands. Wild beauty killed to prettify.
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