Poetry: Heritage (For Walter Leonard)
Landscape Inside You by Rebecca Chaperon
Poetry from Nikki Giovanni's new book, A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter
The folk here
Are old
There are wheel
Chairs and people
Struggling
To push them
There are sad
Eyed people looking
Up from beds they
Cannot stretch out
In
And some simply cannot
Move their heads
All will become something precious
Sapphires … Emeralds … Rubies which
Will be discovered
By other explorers who
Will polish and shape
The stones
And we will wear them
Never knowing
Whose loved one
We have
Embraced
I am the first person in my family to be born in a hospital—so it’s easy to see how much I was teased. Yet there were things like Grandmother’s silver spoons or snuggling under MamaDear, Cornelia Watson’s (who was the first free child born of slave parents) quilt until it literally fell apart that let me know I, too, was a part of the family. I wear a ring that was given to me by a nun whom I dearly loved. I’ve had it since I was graduated from the 8th grade. I think about how all life-forms evolve and how important it is to remember that we, too, will keep changing. One day we will be discovered by another life-form. I can only hope they will feel the love of the love. That’s what my Heritage is. —Nikki Giovanni
“Heritage” is from the new book A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter by Nikki Giovanni. Copyright 2017 by Nikki Giovanni. Published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. Reprinted by permission.
