Quotes from Sonia Sanchez

Let her be. She got a right to be different. She gonna stumble on herself one of these days. Just let the child be.

i gather up each sound you left behind and stretch them on our bed. each nite i breathe you and become high.

Girl don't you know yet that you don't never give up on love? Don't you know you has in you the pulse of winds? The noise of dragonflies?

No. Don't never go looking for love girl. Just wait. It'll come. Like the rain fallin' from the heaven, it'll come. Just don't never give up on love.

Today, home from Trinidad, I thank James Arthur Baldwin for his legacy of fire. A fine rain of words when we had no tongues. He set fire to our eyes. Made a single look, gesture endure. Made a people meaningful and moral. Responsible finally for all our sweet and terrible lives.

i told them that men and women are measured by their acts not by their swaggering speech or walk, or the money they have stashed between their legs.

you, man, will you remember me when i die? will you stare and stain my death and say i saw her dancen among swallows far from the world's obscenities? you, man, will you remember and cry?

To P.J. (2 yrs old who sed write a poem for me in Portland, Oregon) if i cud ever write a poem as beautiful as u little 2/yr/old/brotha, I wud laugh, jump, leap up and touch the stars cuz u be the poem i try for each time i pick up a pen and paper. u. and Morani and Mungu be our blue/blk/stars that will shine on our lives and makes us finally BE. if i cud ever write a poem as beautiful as u, little 2/yr/old/brotha, poetry wud go out of bizness.

Is she a writer too, ma?" "No, honey. She's a lady who has lived life instead of writing about it.

Answer me. Where does a Black woman go when she is me, trailed by myths that this country has invented about her? Where to go to, when all of you have been there already, and claimed the turf as your own and you watch the rest of us shipwrecked by circumstance and color, looking. Waiting. Needing.

And you told us: the storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth, from which there is no shelter in isolation or armament and you told us: the storm will not abate until a just distribution of the fruits of the earth enables men (and women) everywhere to live in dignity and human decency.

And you challenged us to breathe in Bernard Haring's words: the materialistic growth--mania for more and more production and more and more markets for selling unnecessary and even damaging products is a sin against the generation to come what shall we leave to them: rubbish, atomic weapons numerous enough to make the earth uninhabitable, a poisoned atmosphere, polluted water?

When I first saw [James Baldwin] on television in the early sixties, I felt immediately a kinship with this man whose anger and disappointment with America's contradictions transformed his face into a warrior's face, whose tongue transformed our massacres into triumphs. And he left behind a hundred TV deaths: scholars, writers, teachers, and journalists shipwrecked by his revivals and sermons. And the Black audiences watched and shouted amen and felt clean and conscious and chosen.

This earth is hard symmetry This earth of feverish war This earth inflamed with hate

this country might have been a pio neer land once. but. there ain't no mo indians blowing custer's mind with a different image of america. this country might have needed shoot/ outs/daily/ once. but. there ain't no mo real/white/ allamerican bad/guys. just. u & me. blk/and un/armed. this country might have been a pion eer land. once. and it still is. check out the falling gun/shells on our blk/tomorrows.

Where there are many men without honor, there will always be some others who bear in themselves the honor of many men.

And I crept into my eyes. Alone with my daydreams of being woman.

death is a five o'clock door forever changing time.

i saw you vincent van gogh perched on those pennsylvania cornfields communing amid secret black bird societies. yes.

did ya ever cry Black man, did ya ever cry til you knocked all over? - Haiku

They were coming again, those words insistent as his hands had been, pounding inside me, demanding their time and place. I relaxed as my hands moved across the paper like one possessed.

They's men and mens. Some good. Some bad. Some breathing death. Some breathing life.

We all gotta salute death one time or 'nother girl. Death be waitin' outdoors trying to get inside.

Her humming became the only sound in the park. Her voice moved across the bench like a mutilated child. And I cried. For myself. For this woman talkin' about love. For all the women who have ever stretched their bodies out anticipating civilization and finding ruins.