Adulthood
……….. —for claudia
i usta wonder who I’d be
when i was a little girl in Indianapolis
sitting on doctors porches with post-dawn pre-debs
(wondering would my aunt drag me to church Sunday)
i was meaningless
and I wondered if life
would give me a chance to mean
i found a new life in the withdrawal from all things
not like my image
when I was a teenager I usta sit
on front steps conversing
the gym teachers son with embryonic eyes
about the essential essence of the universe
(and other bullshit stuff)
recognizing the basic powerlessness of me
but then i went to college where I learned
that just because everything I was was unreal
that i could be real and not just real through withdrawal
into emotional crosshairs or colored bourgeoisie intellectual pretentions
but from involvement with things approaching reality
i could possible have a life
so catatonic emotions and time wasting sex games
were replaced with functioning commitments to logic and
necessity and the gray area was slowly darkened into
a black thing
for a while progress was being made along with a certain degree
of happiness cause I wrote a book and found a love
and organized a theater and even gave some lectures on
Black history
and began to believe all good people could get
together and win without bloodshed
then
hammarskjold was killed
and lumumba was killed
and diem was killed
and kennedy was killed
and malcom was killed
and evers was killed
and schwerner, chaney and goodman were killed
and liuzzo was killed
and stokely fled the country
and le roi was arrested
and rap was arrested
and pollard, Thompson and cooper were killed
and king was killed
and kennedy was killed
and I sometimes wonder why I didn’t become a debutante
sitting on porches, going to church all the time, wondering
is my eye make-up on straight
or a withdrawn discoursing on the stars and moon
instead of a for real Black person who must now feel
and inflict
pain
by Nikki Giovanni
from No More Masks, An Anthology of Poems by Women
Anchor Books, 1973