do they not wrap themselves around the wrongness there
the diseased spirit of a person defeated
does not your stomach turn into knots
does not the human in you cry out
now imagine
if you were outside your own body
and observing yourself
poisoning your mouth with self-hate language
and disrespecting your soul with insecurities
do your intestines cringe?
do they wrap themselves around the wrongness there?
do you recognize the diseased spirit of a person defeated?
does your stomach turn into knots?
when you are self-hating yourself
does the human in you
Cry Out
It’s National Poetry Month!!
Grab your copy of I am Soul for just 99cents in ebook for the entire month of April. Want a paperback? The Nubian bookstore signing is next week! (4/12) Be sure to stop by for a signed paperback copy and save on shipping. Meet me in person and let’s take pictures and stuff!
Title: The Unveiling
Author: Camille A Frazer
Pages: 132
Publisher: Frazer Mill Publishing (December 12, 2017)
ISBN-10: 0999523007
ISBN-13: 978-0999523001
The Unveiling is a powerful poetry collection from debut author and poet Camille Frazer. She divides her poetry into sections. The first encourages the perception of a bigger picture and lessens the emphasis on the individual. The division between the individual and society is examined in the second. She asserts that violence has crept in during these crisis times.
The poems cover a wide range of issues on the human condition. We gain knowledge of things like faith, hope, love, and beauty. The poems are beautiful and powerful, making you want to reread them for a deeper meaning and time for introspection.
This is definitely not a book that you can skim through. Camille A. Frazer has seen suffering and tragedy during her work as a children’s advocate. Though as she shows in this refreshingly optimistic new poetry collection, tragedy does not have to define us. Through her poems, Frazer examines humanity’s current direction and illustrates each individual life’s importance.
Her poetry shows a steadfast belief in the possibility of a better world in the future. Every person has a purpose, according to Ms. Frazer, and is capable of kindness, contentment, and forming enduring relationships. She desires that you would be motivated by her work to discover your own gifts and then spread them to others.
The only thing stopping this from being a five-star is that the cover doesn’t do it justice.
I believe life tends to happen in stages. There are certain bridges that we have crossed as stepping stones to get to where we are; a small portion of the bigger picture to lead us on. And even where we are today is of itself a mere foundation for where we will be tomorrow. As I think about this, I am recalled to Lucille’s quote and I am reminded of the compassion and the respect that we should have for one another because you never know what’s beyond those eyes. What they have seen, what they see, or what they have endured. And even our idea of what seems difficult or simple can play a different role in the life of someone else. I may have known homelessness but the man who lost his mother to cancer may experience a struggle that would have broken me, whereas my homelessness could have broken him. Makes me think about what each person has endured and how it has contributed to their strength. No matter how seemingly small it was something that we ourselves probably could not have faced if given the chance to do so.
About the Author:
Lucille Clifton 1936–2010
What I noticed right away about Lucille is that she puts the sweet in “short and sweet”. Her poems are often not very long-winded, but they are short, almost speeding like, but not tasteless. Clifton is noted for saying much with few words. In a review of her work, Peggy Rosenthal commented, “The first thing that strikes us about Lucille Clifton’s poetry is what is missing: capitalization, punctuation, long and plentiful lines. We see a poetry so pared down that its spaces take on substance, become a shaping presence as much as the words themselves.”
In an American Poetry Review article about Clifton’s work, Robin Becker commented on Clifton’s lean style: “Clifton’s poetics of understatement—no capitalization, few strong stresses per line, many poems totaling fewer than twenty lines, the sharp rhetorical question—includes the essential only.”
In addition, Lucille Clifton’s work hinges largely on life, emphasizing endurance and strength with a focus particularly on the African American experience and family life. It is another reason I enjoy her poetry. In 2007, Clifton was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in which the judges remarked,
“One always feels the looming humaneness around Lucille Clifton’s poems—it is a moral quality that some poets have and some don’t.”
In addition to the Ruth Lilly prize, Clifton was the first author to have two books of poetry chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 and Next: New Poems (1987).
An additional plus is that Lucille was not just a poet, but she was also an author of children’s books, designed to help them to understand the world and enable an understanding of black heritage specifically.
In books like “All Us Come Cross the Water “(1973), Clifton raises awareness of African-American history and heritage. Her most famous creation, though, was Everett Anderson, an African-American boy living in a big city; an eight title series that won the Coretta Scott King Award. Connecting Clifton’s work as a children’s author to her poetry, Jocelyn K. Moody in the Oxford Companion to African American Literature wrote: “Like her poetry, Clifton’s short fiction extols the human capacity for love, rejuvenation, and transcendence over weakness and malevolence even as it exposes the myth of the American dream.”
And that’s it for this weeks episode of Writers Quote Wednesday!
Be sure to checkout Silver Threading to see how you can join the fun.
In “A Child is Born” a great photographic look on life inside the womb, Lennart Nilson and Lars Hamberger begin their work with love: “Love is an incredibly strong, enduring force and has been since time immemorial. The pattern is recognized in every culture in our world: two people are mutually attracted and feel the irresistible urge to unite.”
Love is a very powerful verb. It overcomes all things; it endures all things. Every culture around the world and every people can understand the language of love. If I traveled to Germany and saw a man having trouble standing up straight I will be moved to assist him, along with other bystanders who will immediately drop their current endeavors to assist this man—this is the language of love. We do not need to speak the German tongue to know that he needs help. This is the power of love. Sometimes love will cause one person to separate from another, not because they hate them, but because they love themselves too much to allow another person to continuously cross them because just as love is beautiful, love is also discipline. Even in war, the army that loves is always the army that wins because love overcomes hate. It possesses a very strong and immovable purity. If a man fights for a cause he truly loves, that cause is better able to grow because of his love for it. For this reason we should not think that discipline is not love. Sometimes love will require you to do away with those things you enjoy doing because it’s wrong or is just not healthy for you. After all, you cannot love anyone else if you do not love yourself first.
The world teaches us that anything (to which it promotes) truth or no truth, must be accepted as truth or else that rejection is void of love. Just because I don’t agree with you does not mean I don’t love you. It does not mean I won’t offer you the same love that is due everyone else. But if asked I’m going to tell you the truth, and I’m going to do it without judgment because “it is rain that grows flowers, not thunder” (Rumi). At the same time, when it get to the point where we can no longer walk together, this will not mean that I don’t love you, though that’s what the world teaches. If I cut you off it does not mean that I hate you, it’s just that I will not allow myself to be disrespected, nor will I conform to the contours of lies for the sake of peace, because I love myself too much to be willingly led astray. It is only logical, that when two people can no longer agree, the two must separate, but they can still love each other in the process. As a result, if there’s anything you need that I have, I will give it if given the chance because that’s love. I don’t have to agree with you, but I can forgive you of all your transgressions against me, and if you need the shirt off my back I will give it to you because that’s love. If you look around you however, you will see that this understanding is absent in the world. Too many people are filled with pride. They walk around holding onto grudges as if they themselves have the power to save and to condemn. Men have grown cold and the thought of his heart is only evil continually.
Have you ever wondered why children are so precious? Do you ever wonder why they speak to everyone? Why they want to hug and cling onto everyone they see? In this world we have to shield them from that, touching and speaking to everyone, because people have become so defiled with hatred. The reason however, children touch and feel is because they have a genuine love for others. It is only when we age that we lose some of that virtue and we become just as cold and hateful as the world around us. The world does not know love. The world does not teach love. The world does not love. Instead, in many ways the world has robbed us of love; like a child who loses his innocence, we have lost track of how to love. It is our life source yet it is missing from our lives. It is the umbilical cord that connects us to our creator and to the rest of mankind. It is both essential and necessary for mankind to surround itself with love. It is the air we breathe and without it we suffocate. In fact, mankind today is suffocating and have been for a long time; suffering silently because it does not have love. Man searches for it, but he is unable to find it. From the moment we emerge from our mother’s wombs we are looking for love. Many of us search for it, yearn for it, and even act out because we do not have it. We know it mostly by way of its relation to relationships. This is just one of the primary ways to which we seek to find it, in the embrace of another person; because mankind was made in the image of love, so in each other is where we often seek it.
If as a result mankind cannot love, then the very thing that makes us human has failed us because we do not know love, cannot find love, and cannot exhibit love. It is a love that is so important to have that it is required before we can ever attempt to define what it means to be human, for humanity itself requires it. That’s why some people just wake up and decide to murder an entire family. They are so imbalanced that they explode, go crazy, and become deranged; they lose track of their humanity, and all because they do not know love.
When mankind loses the ability to love or to be loved by someone else, mankind is no longer human. That’s the power of love, and it is the answer to every question.
The PBS Blog 