Patricia Spears Jones reads and discusses Gwendolyn Brooks' "my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell"

my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell

I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can tell when I may dine again.
No man can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.

—Gwendolyn Brooks

Rights & Access

Gwendolyn Brooks, “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell” from Selected Poems.

 Copyright © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Reprinted By Consent of Brooks Permissions.

Commentary

My name is Patricia Spears Jones. I will be reading Gwendolyn Brooks’ “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell.”

Gwendolyn Brooks will be ever known as the first black American author to win a Pulitzer Prize, and she was a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Her time there served as a model for poet laureates to come. Brooks’ subjects were the life and times of black Americans, especially those who moved north during the Great Migration when millions of southern blacks moved to the states in the Midwest, the West, and the North.

Since she was Chicago-raised (even if Kansas-born) her focus was on Chicago blacks, with whom she and her family shared trying social and economic times. She understood and deeply cared about the plight and aspirations of her fellow black citizens. “my dream, my work, must wait till after hell” is an excellent introduction to Brooks’ ability to express the very complicated lives of black Americans. Written as part of a series of poems dedicated to black American servicemen who were about to enter military service in World War II, these poems—all sonnets—captured their plight. Here were black men who were daily discriminated against going off to fight fascism. The patriotism was strong, and their willingness to fight and die for this nation showed that love of this difficult country. But, more importantly, Brooks’ speaker wants to live—to return, to gain the “bread and honey” that he will miss when he goes to war.

Gwendolyn Brooks is one of my poetry foremothers, and she represents what American poets should continue to be like. She worked on her craft, she deeply cared about the ways in which the ideals of this nation rarely served its citizens, and her work demanded that we attend to those ideals and create the environment to make them real, so that the “bread and honey” would feed all of us.

I am so pleased to have this fine poem—this exemplary sonnet—enter into the soundscape of the Library of Congress.

Commentator's Poem

Occasioned by Akilah Oliver

           My Facebook Updates: February 24-25, 2010

Conversations, condolences, laughter and remembrances--loss and community
     come together--and rain, much rain.

2 margaritas, ice cream, tears

My mother turned 92 and she’s mad at the rain.  I hope to be mad at the rain 
     if I live that long

Look for the shimmer.


And then she sorted up a poem

1.

Rain mad at

Shimmer look for

Margaritas, too many, not enough of

Ice cream, wrong flavor

Condolences f***ing why?

Conversations rupture routine

Laughter brings her spirit through


2.

Circumference of mortality   		(crying)
Laughter frames the circle							        (anecdotes)
Shimmer radiates frame 			               (silver)
Rain falls rain rain rain

An Arkansas Poet (Dumas, Henry) 

Play long play soft 
Play long play soft 
Play ebony
Play ivory

3.

Shangguan Wan ‘er aka Shangguan Zhaorong: Twenty Five Poems
Upon Traveling to the Changning Princess’s Floating Wine Cup Pond

Translator (Larsen, Jeanne)

From #9 

up in the mountain   looking
far in a single
glance   I’m struck
by the long spring’s start  
teams of horses
clog the boulevards    the fringe
of town*

An Arkansas Poet (Jones, Patricia Spears)

Sometimes it is good to be at the fringe of town
Just this side of the hubbub, gossip, the need to demand

4.

Across centuries, galaxies, the rains of words
Feather the floating wine cup pond
Awaiting a poet’s lithe body ready for the
Cool drunken swim

Play ebony play soft
Play ivory play hard

Rain the words into floating wine cups’
Open mouths

Swim with horses on the boulevards
Up the mountain’s shaky roads

5.

What is the color of Paradise?  How would we know?
All travelers who go there stay 
What need they of this world’s glory

But there may be
A possible desire to welcome those who will follow

Play play play ebony
Play soft play long


In the Memory of Akilah Oliver
March 2, 2011

* Play Ebony, Play Ivory by Henry Dumas
* “The Fringe of Town” by Patricia Spears Jones
* Poem from Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women’s Poems from Tang China 
       translated by Jeanne Larsen

—Patricia Spears Jones

Rights & Access

“Occasioned by Akilah Oliver” Patricia Spears Jones from A Lucent Fire. White Pine Press, 2015.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

  • Patricia Spears Jones

    Patricia Spears Jones (1951- ) was born in Forrest City, Arkansas. She is the author of several poetry collections, including A Lucent Fire (2015), Painkiller (2010), and Femme du Monde (2006). She has won awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art and the New York Community Trust, as well as fellowships and grants from the Black Earth Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2017, she won the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets and Writers. She has taught at the Poetry Project, Poets House, the Fine Arts Work Center, CUNY campuses and Adelphi University. She is the organizer for American Poets Congress. Photo credit: Brett Hall Jones.

  • Gwendolyn Brooks

    Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) was born in Topeka, Kansas, and raised in Chicago. She is the author of several books of poetry, including A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Allen (1949). She was the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and the National Medal of Arts. She also received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. Brooks served as poet laureate for the state of Illinois from 1968 until her death, and in 1985 she became the first black woman appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the position now known as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry).