I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.

What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

The end of a thing, is never the end, something is always being born like a year of a baby.

Intellect doesn't translate across cultures; intuition does.

I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.

the lost women I need to know their names those women I would have walked with, jauntily the way men go in groups swinging their arms, and the ones those sweating women whom I would have joined After a hard game to chew the fat what would we have called each other laughing joking into our beer? where are my gangs, my teams, my mislaid sisters? all the women who could have known me, where in the world are their names?

I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem.