My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.

Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.

When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I asked you, baby, If you understood- You told me that you didn't, But you thought you would.

Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.