Whining is just unbecoming.

I think all poems are commissioned. They just come to me without somebody outside commissioning them. The idea comes and I will live with them 'til I get it as close to what I mean. I've never been totally satisfied. I've come close a few times.

I believed that there was a God because I was told it by my grandmother and later by other adults. But when I found that I knew not only that there was God but that I was a child of God, when I understood that, when I comprehended that, more than that, when I internalized that, ingested that, I became courageous.

Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God.

The breezes of the West African night were intimate and shy, licking the hair, sweeping through cotton dresses with unseemly intimacy, then disappearing into the utter blackness.

I walk into a room Just as cool as you please, And to a man, The fellows stand or Fall down on their knees.

Never whine. Whining lets a brute know that a victim is in the neighborhood.