Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry is known for its powerful blend of musical language, social awareness, and deep empathy for everyday Black life in America. She wrote about ordinary people—mothers, soldiers, children, teenagers on street corners—and revealed their inner struggles with dignity and emotional force. Her poems often explore themes like racial identity, injustice, poverty, resilience, and the quiet heroism found in daily survival.
Brooks had a remarkable ability to shift between lyrical beauty and sharp political insight. In works such as “We Real Cool”, she uses deceptively simple language to explore youth, choices, and consequences. In “The Bean Eaters”, she paints a moving portrait of an elderly couple living in hardship yet holding onto small moments of tenderness. Her poetry after the 1960s became even more overtly political, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, Black pride, and community empowerment.
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| Gwendolyn brooks |
Her mastery of form—sonnets, ballads, free verse—combined with her bold themes made her the first Black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize. Brooks’ poetry remains influential because it speaks honestly about struggle while celebrating the strength, courage, and humanity of her community.
Black Love
Black love, provide the adequate electric
for what is lapsed and lenient in us now.
Rouse us from blur. Call us.
Call adequately the postponed corner brother.
And call our man in the pin-stripe suiting and restore him to his abler logic; to his people.
Call to the shattered sister and repair her
in her difficult hour, narrow her fever.
Call to the Elders—
our customary grace and further sun
loved in the Long-ago, loathed in the Lately;
a luxury of languish and of rust.
Appraise, assess our Workers in the Wild, lest they descend to malformation and to undertow.
Black love, define and escort our romantic young, by means and redemption,
discipline.
Nourish our children—proud, strong
little men upright-easy:
quick
flexed
little stern-warm historywomen....
I see them in Ghana, Kenya, in the city of Dar-es-Salaam, in Kalamazoo,
Mound Bayou, in Chicago.
Lovely loving children
with long soft eyes.
Black love, prepare us all for interruptions;
assaults, unwanted pauses; furnish for leavings and for losses.
Just come out Blackly glowing!
On the ledges—in the lattices—against the failing light of candles that stutter,
and in the chop and challenge of our apprehension—
be
the Alwayswonderful of this world.
Boy Breaking Glass
To Marc Crawford
from whom the commissioin
Whose broken window is a cry of art
(success, that winks aware
as elegance, as a treasonable faith)
is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première.
Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.
Our barbarous and metal little man.
“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
If not an overture, a desecration.”
Full of pepper and light
and Salt and night and cargoes.
“Don’t go down the plank
if you see there’s no extension.
Each to his grief, each to
his loneliness and fidgety revenge.
Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.”
The only sanity is a cup of tea.
The music is in minors.
Each one other
is having different weather.
“It was you, it was you who threw away my name!
And this is everything I have for me.”
Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,
the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,
runs. A sloppy amalgamation.
A mistake.
A cliff.
A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.
Tommy
I put my seed into the ground
And said, 'I'll watch it grow.'
I watered it and cared for it
As well as I could know.
One day I walked in my back yard,
And oh. what did I see!
My seed had popped itself right out
Without consulting me.
The Old Marrieds
But in the crowding darkness not a word did they say.
Though the pretty-coated birds had piped so lightly all the day.
And he had seen the lovers in the little side streets.
And she had heard the morning stories clogged with sweets.
It was quite a time for loving. It was midnight. It was May.
But in the crowding darknesss not a word did they say.
To Be In Love
To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.
You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.
Suddenly you know he knows too.
He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or a light spring weather.
His hand to take your hand is overmuch.
Too much to bear.
You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.
When he
Shuts a door-
Is not there_
Your arms are water.
And you are free
With a ghastly freedom.
You are the beautiful half
Of a golden hurt.
You remember and covet his mouth
To touch, to whisper on.
Oh when to declare
Is certain Death!
Oh when to apprize
Is to mesmerize,
To see fall down, the Column of Gold,
Into the commonest ash.
The Good Man
The good man.
He is still enhancer, renouncer.
In the time of detachment,
in the time of the vivid heather and affectionate evil,
in the time of oral
grave grave legalities of hate - all real
walks our prime registered reproach and seal.
Our successful moral.
The good man.
Watches our bogus roses, our rank wreath, our
love's unreliable cement, the gray
jubilees of our demondom.
Coherent
Counsel! Good man.
Require of us our terribly excluded blue.
Constrain, repair a ripped, revolted land.
Put hand in hand land over.
Reprove
the abler droughts and manias of the day
and a felicity entreat.
Love.
Complete
your pledges, reinforce your aides, renew
stance, testament.
The Bean Eaters
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair,
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.
Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.
And remembering…
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room
that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and
cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.
