Wendy Stand Up with Your Proud Hair!

                              —for Gwendolyn Brooks

By Sandra L. West

When the daze of this day comes done

These days of dreadlocks

VS dark n' lovely goldilocks

Wendy still wears her natural.

Gwendolyn Brooks calls Wendy to her feet

As in " ... and I'll like to recognize

Sister-Reverend-Doctor-Bishop-so-and-so..."

The poet's statement of purpose,

The blackest aesthetic,

Never pales from style.

As Gwendolyn speaks

To the gerri curled, california furled

Revlon flexed and hexed girls,

Wendy still wears her natural.

Like the pen of the poet

That speaks the truth plain

Happily, knappily, as it lays.

posted 12 July 2006

Gwendolyn Brooks

Literary Production

Poetry

    A Street in Bronzeville (1945)
    Annie Allen (1949)
    Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956)
    The Bean Eaters (1960)
    Selected Poems (1963)
    We Real Cool (1966)
    The Wall (1967)
    In the Mecca (1968)
    Family Pictures (1970)
    Riot (1970)
    Black Steel: Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali (1971)
    The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971)
    Aloneness (1971)
    Aurora (1972)
    Beckonings (1975)
    Black Love (1981)
    To Disembark (1981)
    The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986)
    Blacks (1987)
    Winnie (1988)

    Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle (1989)

    Children Coming Home (1991)

    In Montgomery and Other Poems (2003)

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Sandra L. West, a member of The Harlem Writers Guild, published a memoir What’s In A Name, Ghana Mae Jane?  in the Spring/Summer 2005 edition of Obsidian III: Literature of the African Diaspora. Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, the first encyclopedia devoted to the movement, West is a Contributing Writer to Contemporary American Women Poets: An A-Z Guide. West teaches African American Literature at Rutgers University.

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BLACK CLASSIC BOOKS   BCP Digital Printing

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posted 9 November 2007