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Authors: Maya Angelou
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in the years to come
Will sit, robed and capped
Where you sit today,
And will ask the question
What will you do?
There is an African adage
Which fits your situation.
It is, “The trouble for the
Thief is not how to steal the Chief ’s
Bugle, but where to play it.”
Are you prepared to work
To make this country, our country
More than it is today?
For that is the job to be done.
That is the reason you have
Worked hard, your sacrifices
Of energy and time,
The monies of your parents
Or of government have been paid
So that you can transform your
Country and your world.
Look beyond your tasseled caps
And you will see injustice.
At the end of your fingertips
You will find cruelties,
Irrational hate, bedrock sorrow
And terrifying loneliness.
There is your work.
Make a difference
Use this degree which you
Have earned to increase
Virtue in your world.
Your people, all people,
Are hoping that you are
The ones to do so.
The order is large,
The need immense.
But you can take heart.
For you know that you
Have already shown courage.
And keep in mind
One person, with good purpose,
can, constitute the majority.
Since life is our most precious gift
And since it is given to us to live but once,
Let us so live that we will not regret
Years of uselessness and inertia
You will be surprised that in time
The days of single-minded research
And the nights of crippling, cramming
Will be forgotten.
You will be surprised that these years of
Sleepless nights and months of uneasy
Days will be rolled into
An altering event called the
“Good old days.” And you will not
Be able to visit them even with an invitation
Since that is so you must face your presence.
You are prepared
Go out and transform your world
Welcome to your graduation.
Congratulations
Poetry
To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Til the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening…
A tall, slim tree…
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.
(Published in
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
by Alfred A. Knopf & Vintage Press)
If African and many African American poets have one theme it most assuredly is “Wouldn’t everyone like to be…Black Like Me?” Black poets revel in their color, plunging pink palmed, black hands deep into blackness and ceremonially painting themselves with the substance of their ancestry.
There is a flourish of pride in works which must stupefy the European reader. How can exaltation be wrenched from degradation? How can ecstasy be pulled out of the imprisonment of brutality? What can society’s rejects find inside themselves to esteem?
Aimé Césaire, speaking of the African, wrote:
Those who invented neither gunpowder nor compass
Those who never knew how to conquer steam or
electricity
Those who explore neither seas nor sky
But those without whom the earth would not be
earth….
My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled
against
The clamor of the day;
My negritude is not a speck of dead water on the
earth’s dead eye,
My negritude is neither tower nor cathedral….
It perforates opaque dejection with its upright
patience.
(Published in
Return to My Native Land
by Bloodaxe Books)
Césaire was writing in the same spirit as that which inspired the black American poet Melvin B. Tolson. When he wrote:
None in the Land can say
To us black men Today:
You dupe the poor with rags-to-riches tales,
And leave the workers empty dinner pails.
None in the Land can say
To us black men Today:
You send flame gutting tanks,
Like swarms of flies
And pump a hell from dynamiting skies.
You fill machine-gunned towns with rotting dead–
A No Man’s Land where children cry for bread.
(Published in
The Negro Caravan
by Citadel Press)
Mari Evans gave heart to African Americans in general and women in particular in her poem, “I Am a Black Woman”:
I
am a black woman
tall as a cypress
strong
beyond all definition
Will sit, robed and capped
Where you sit today,
And will ask the question
What will you do?
There is an African adage
Which fits your situation.
It is, “The trouble for the
Thief is not how to steal the Chief ’s
Bugle, but where to play it.”
Are you prepared to work
To make this country, our country
More than it is today?
For that is the job to be done.
That is the reason you have
Worked hard, your sacrifices
Of energy and time,
The monies of your parents
Or of government have been paid
So that you can transform your
Country and your world.
Look beyond your tasseled caps
And you will see injustice.
At the end of your fingertips
You will find cruelties,
Irrational hate, bedrock sorrow
And terrifying loneliness.
There is your work.
Make a difference
Use this degree which you
Have earned to increase
Virtue in your world.
Your people, all people,
Are hoping that you are
The ones to do so.
The order is large,
The need immense.
But you can take heart.
For you know that you
Have already shown courage.
And keep in mind
One person, with good purpose,
can, constitute the majority.
Since life is our most precious gift
And since it is given to us to live but once,
Let us so live that we will not regret
Years of uselessness and inertia
You will be surprised that in time
The days of single-minded research
And the nights of crippling, cramming
Will be forgotten.
You will be surprised that these years of
Sleepless nights and months of uneasy
Days will be rolled into
An altering event called the
“Good old days.” And you will not
Be able to visit them even with an invitation
Since that is so you must face your presence.
You are prepared
Go out and transform your world
Welcome to your graduation.
Congratulations
Poetry
To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Til the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening…
A tall, slim tree…
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.
(Published in
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
by Alfred A. Knopf & Vintage Press)
If African and many African American poets have one theme it most assuredly is “Wouldn’t everyone like to be…Black Like Me?” Black poets revel in their color, plunging pink palmed, black hands deep into blackness and ceremonially painting themselves with the substance of their ancestry.
There is a flourish of pride in works which must stupefy the European reader. How can exaltation be wrenched from degradation? How can ecstasy be pulled out of the imprisonment of brutality? What can society’s rejects find inside themselves to esteem?
Aimé Césaire, speaking of the African, wrote:
Those who invented neither gunpowder nor compass
Those who never knew how to conquer steam or
electricity
Those who explore neither seas nor sky
But those without whom the earth would not be
earth….
My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled
against
The clamor of the day;
My negritude is not a speck of dead water on the
earth’s dead eye,
My negritude is neither tower nor cathedral….
It perforates opaque dejection with its upright
patience.
(Published in
Return to My Native Land
by Bloodaxe Books)
Césaire was writing in the same spirit as that which inspired the black American poet Melvin B. Tolson. When he wrote:
None in the Land can say
To us black men Today:
You dupe the poor with rags-to-riches tales,
And leave the workers empty dinner pails.
None in the Land can say
To us black men Today:
You send flame gutting tanks,
Like swarms of flies
And pump a hell from dynamiting skies.
You fill machine-gunned towns with rotting dead–
A No Man’s Land where children cry for bread.
(Published in
The Negro Caravan
by Citadel Press)
Mari Evans gave heart to African Americans in general and women in particular in her poem, “I Am a Black Woman”:
I
am a black woman
tall as a cypress
strong
beyond all definition
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