This Is My Century

New and Collected Poems

Margaret Walker

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780820342399
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Margaret Walker became the first African American to win a national literary award when her collection For My People was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1942. Over the next fifty years she enriched American literature in endless ways through her writings and, in 1993, she received the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.

This Is My Century is Walker's own defining summation of her career. Selected by the author herself, the one hundred poems include thirty-seven previously uncollected pieces and the entire contents of three hard-to-find volumes: the award-winning For My People (1942), Prophets for a New Day (1970), and October Journey (1975).

THIS IS MY CENTURY

THIS IS MY CENTURY

Black Synthesis of Time

I

O Man, behold your destiny.

Look on this life

and know our future living;

our former lives from these our present days

now melded into one.

Queens of the Nile,

Gods of our Genesis,

Parade of centuries

behold the rising sun.

The dying Western sky

with yawning gates of death,

from decadence and dissonance

destroying false and fair;

worlds of our galaxies,

our waning moons and suns

look on this living hell

and see the rising sun.

II

Speak, heralds of our honored dead

Proclaim the heroes’ line.

Declaim the sculptured and created truths

from prehistoric time.

Infinitude is bared to finite eyes:

We see the whirling suns and stars

first fixed and moving space

to shape beginning Time.

III

This is my century

I saw it grow

from darkness into dawn.

I watched the molten lava pour

from red volcanic skies;

Islands and Mountains heave

into the Sea

Move Man into the spiralled axis turn

and saw six suns and sunsets rise and burn.

IV

Osiris, Isis, black and beauteous gods,

whence came your spectacle

of rhythmed life and death?

You gods of love

on pyres of sacrifice

our human hearts become

old hearthstones of our tribal birth and flame:

the hammer and the forge,

the anvil and the fire,

the righteous sparks go wild

like rockets in the sky.

The fireworks overhead

flame red and blue and gold

against one darkened sky.

O living man behold

your destined hands control

the flowered earth ablaze,

alive, each golden flower unfold.

Now see our marching dead

The tyrants too, have fled.

The broken bones and blood

Have melted in the flood.

V Cinque (From the Amistad)

Cinque.

O man magnificent.

The gods endowed you well.

Prince of our innocence

the stars move round your head.

You stride the earth to tell

your sons and daughters young

from island, sea, and land—

a continental span—

how men are made of gods

and born to rule the world.

In majesty with monumental hands

you bridge the Universe

and centuries of desert sands.

Bequeath to us your handsome dignity

and lordly noble trust.

VI

Gods of compassion, rise

In mortal human form.

The splendor of your eyes

Streaks lightning through the storm.

VII

This is my century—

Black synthesis of Time:

The freudian slip

The Marxian mind

Kierkegaardian Leap of Faith

and Du Boi’s prophecy: the color line.

These are the comrades of Einstein,

the dawning of another Age,

new symphony of Time.

VIII

New liberties arise;

from Freedom’s flag unfold;

the right to live and be

both stronger and more wise.

Each child, a prophet’s eyes;

each place, a priestess stone.

This Beast no man denies

the godly-human throne.

Each generation cries

to touch divinity

and open up the sunlit splitting skies.

IX

I have had a good time singing

the songs of my fathers

the melodies of my mothers

the plaintive minor notes of my grandmothers.

I heard the drums of Africa

and I made the music of Spain.

I gave rhythm to the world

and called it syncopation.

All the Calypso brothers

have danced music in my head

and all my beautiful jazzy greats

like old Satchmo,

the Duke, the Count, the Duchess, the King

the Queen, Prince, and Princesses

they were the sons and daughters of royalty

in my dynasty.

I am a black shoeshine boy

made immortal by Barthe’

and I am a black mother

running from slavery.

X

Look on my bronzed and black-red-mahogany face

and know me well.

For I am the seed of the earth,

the broken body of the Son of God,

and the Spirit of the Universe.

Drink wine in my memory

and pour water on stones

singing Libation songs.

I came out of the sun

and I swam rivers of blood

to touch the moon.

I will not flinch before the holocaust

for I am a deathless soul,

immortal, black, and free.

GIANTS OF MY CENTURY

Five men shaped this century

with their thinking, breathing, loving lives.

They measured out the land of all our years

and blew the trumpets of the decades in our ears.

I Albert Einstein

A hundred years ago was born a man

whose vision of the universe exceeded space and time

beyond the measuring of finite spheres

into illimitable, vast, and recreating galaxies of stars.

He wrote the bars

of music

formulated dreams

and three equations of the nuclear Age.

A face of innocence, a brain of ancient tense,

a catalyst and maker of the Age.

His theories sounded vaguely in our minds

of finite and the infinite, of relativity;

the unity of time and knowledge and diversity

the waves of light and energy and space continuum with time.

A hundred years ago just such a man was born.

II Sigmund Freud

The Freudian Age has covered, too, our time

within this century.

One Sigmund Freud, a prophet born in ancient times

like all the others from despised sons

and all but one, a Jew

not of the Ar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword Looking Up, Margaret Walker
• Introduction: Margaret Walker and the Practice of Poetry
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• For My People
• Prophets For a New Day
• October Journey
• This is My Century
• Farish Street
• Footnotes