“Through my many years of reading poetry, I feel as though I’ve absorbed other people’s stories and feelings. I strongly believe this has fortified me with a spirit of kindness, poetry as a daily pill of compassion. This is a grounding tenet in my belief in poetry as a communal and righteous good. We get to see through each other’s eyes and feel through each other’s hearts.” StoriesFeelingsPoetryCompassionKindnessGoodnessFeeling Author:Major Jackson
“America is defined by its belief in equality, freedom, liberty, opportunity, and justice, but maybe even more by its betrayal of those principles and then its struggle to recommit to values we hold self-evident.” AmericaValuesOpportunityJusticeFreedomLibertyPrinciplesUnited StatesStrugglesUs Author:Major Jackson
“ll we want is to succumb to a single kiss that will contain us like a marathon with no finish line, and if so, that we land like newspapers before sunrise, halcyon mornings arrived like blue martinis. I am learning the steps to a foreign song: her mind was torpedo, and her body was storm, a kind of Wow. All we want is a metropolis of Sundays, an empire of hand-holding and park benches? She says, "Leave it all up to me.” LoveWomenKiss Book:Holding Company: Poems Source: Holding Company: Poems
“At a young age, I saw that the pain of rage and resentment is not just in your body. It can course through your actions, and send askew the course of your life. I’ve experienced my fair share of slings and arrows, wrongs done to me. As much as they hurt in the moment, I know they do not belong on the back of my future self.” Letting GoAngerRageResentment Author:Major Jackson
“It is my annual day of sobbing. What are these brown hands for if not to bury my eyes in the ancient rivers of wrongs?” PoetryGriefSorrowPoemCryingAfrican AmericansBlacksSobbingWrongs Author:Major Jackson