NATIONAL POETRY MONTH 2011

In an attempt to highlight, if even a small way, poetry and the world as seen through the eyes of blacks throughout the African Diaspora, I will post a few poems by different poets.  Poetry has the ability to be at once seditious and tractable, , impersonal and personal; it moves mountains, soothes nerves, and can just puts the reader in a feel good "yeah, I know that" mode and does it better than most other written mediums. 

The first poet is Kola Boof. Kola Boof (born Naima Bint Harith) is an Egyptian-Sudanese American raised novelist and poet, once called "the African Garbo" by The New York Times and noted for the works Flesh and the Devil, Long Train to the Redeeming Sin and Nile River Woman. Boof is an activist and writer whose writing has been declared obscene in Morocco and whose life has been threatened more than once due to the nature of her writing and her provocative words. For a more information on Boof : http://aalbc.com/authors/kola_boof.htm

Black Beauty’s Totem


I wish to find the swell
of constant waters

…and the death of the locust night

I wish to find the anguished heart
of the blue blackened earthquake
and lay my monkish head against his
armoured chest.

To bless him with full, swollen lips
and behold his darkened portholes
drinking my softened flesh…oh, but yes

I wish to die as spirits then…

droplets

lost and swishing forever
deep within my purple folds
sweet

like birth and no regret



-Kola Boof, from Nile River Woman