In memory of Carolyn Rodgers, feminist and poet

A New York Times obituary published today yesterday highlights the death of an important poet, Carolyn Rodgers.

Carolyn Rodgers, a leading poet of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s whose work wove strands of feminism, black power, spirituality and writerly self-consciousness into a sometimes raging, sometimes ruminative search for identity, died on April 2 in Chicago. She was 69.

I found a poem of hers from 1992 that I wanted to share in honor of her passing:
Poem for Some Black Women
©1992 Carolyn M. Rodgers
i am lonely,
all the people i know
i know too well
there was comfort in that
at first but now
we know each others miseries
too well.
The rest of the poem is after the jump.

we are
lonely women, who spend time waiting for
occasional flings
we live with fear.
we are lonely.
we are talented, dedicated, well read
BLACK, COMMITTED,
we are lonely,
we understand the world problems
Black women’s problems with Black men
but all
we really understand is
lonely.
when we laugh,
we are so happy to laugh
we cry when we laugh
we are lonely.
we are busy people
always doing things
fearing getting trapped in rooms
loud with empty…
yet
knowing the music of silence/hating it/hoarding it
loving it/treasuring it,
it often birthing our creativity
we are lonely
being soft and being hard
supporting our selves, earning our own bread
soft/hard/hard/soft
knowing that need must not show
will frighten away
knowing that we must
walk back-wards nonchalantly on our tip-toeness
into
happiness,
if only for stingy moments
we know too much
we learn to understand everything,
to make too much sense out
of the world,
of pain
of lonely…
we buy clothes, we take trips,
we wish, we pray, we meditate, we curse, we crave, we coo,
we caw,
we need ourselves sick, we need, we need
we lonely we grow tired of tears we grow tired of fear
we grow tired but must al-ways be soft and not too serious…
not too smart not too bitchy not too sapphire
not too dumb not too not too not too
a little less a little more
add here detract there
.lonely.