"If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET."

--

Source : Countee Cullen (2013). “Countee Cullen: Collected Poems: (American Poets Project #32)”, p.31, Library of America

Countee Cullen

“summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat;it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.”
“I've traveled all over the country for years speaking in churches, teaching the Ten Commandments. It's amazing if 2 percent of any congregation knows the Ten Commandments.”

Source : Source: blog.sfgate.com
“Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.”
“What most of us want is to be heard, to communicate.”
“To predict the future we would have to know today what we will learn tomorrow which will shape our future actions”
“I don't know; it just seemed like the cooler guys are playing Xbox. At least the ones I know.”
“My purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the Western stars until I die.”
“For me, reading was always the great escape without getting your fingers burnt.”

You may also like: