"A poet can read. A poet can write. A poet is African in Africa, or Irish in Ireland, or French on the left bank of Paris, or white in Wisconsin. A poet writes in her own language. A poet writes of her own people, her own history, her own vision, her own room, her own house where she sits at her own table quietly placing one word after another word until she builds a line and a movement and an image and a meaning that somersaults all of these into the singing, the absolutely individual voice of the poet: at liberty. A poet is somebody free. A poet is someone at home. How should there be Black poets in America?..." - June Jordan

Did you know I used to be a bit of a poet back in college? Yeah, I wrote me a verse or two. I happend to come across this one online - I remember it was posted in a newsletter in college. Ahh, the memories:

Black Gold
by Ricardo Wilkins
Copyright 1997

This is a poem
About a woman
That other men wish they could know
And I feel

Life with this Queen couldn’t get any sweeter, like
Canine to master, I’m running to meet her, and
Blind men are weeping, for they cannot see
Her vision of shining black gold.

Sincerely and truly,
This is no joke
Your loveliness
Makes my mind’s mental eye choke
Looked around and found no crowns
On colorless women
So my mind gets flashbacks to black skin
And obsidian dreams

And it seems
That just hearing your name
Makes me take mental journeys
To African plains
And lovely savannas.
A vision so bright
She matches the stars
In an African night.

Black Woman, your beauty
Flows out through your smile
Like the waters that flow
Through the African Nile.
Black Woman, the name,
Yes, I hear it again,
And like violets in bloom I explode from within…
Ka-Boom!

And soon
I come off of my high
But if I couldn’t puff on Black woman I’d die
And no poem by poet
No scripture by scribe
No song dressed in rhythm
Has power to describe
The essence of sensual
Style of a Queen
A fluorescent expression
Of African dreams
Like pearls from an oyster
Like diamonds from coal
I know a true treasure
I call her black gold.