“Hold fast to your dreams,” Langston Hughes wrote roughly midway through black Americans’ journey from the dreams of Harriet Tubman and other prisoners of war of American Slavery to those of today’s black Americans who — especially the young ones, we hope — can watch America’s President and dream dreams of unprecedented ambition.

-The Editors

Still I Rise

by Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I’ve got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

Dreams

by Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

The Day I Saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott’s   Collected Poems

by Yusef Komunyakaa

Was he looking for St. Lucia’s light

to touch his face those first days

in the official November snow & sleet

falling on the granite pose of Lincoln?

If he were searching for property lines

drawn in the blood, or for a hint

of resolve crisscrossing a border,

maybe he’d find clues in the taste of breadfruit.

I could see him stopped there squinting

in crooked light, the haze of Wall Street

touching clouds of double consciousness,

an eye etched into a sign borrowed from Egypt.

If he’s looking for tips on basketball,

how to rise up & guard the hoop,

he may glean a few theories about war

but they aren’t in The Star-Apple Kingdom.

If he wants to finally master himself,

searching for clues to govern seagulls

in salty air, he’ll find henchmen busy with locks

& chains in a ghost schooner’s nocturnal calm.

He’s reading someone who won’t speak

of milk & honey, but of looking ahead

beyond pillars of salt raised in a dream

where fat bulbs split open the earth.

The spine of the manifest was broken,

leaking deeds, songs & testaments.

Justice stood in the shoes of mercy,

& doubt was bandaged up & put to bed.

Now, he looks as if he wants to eat words,

their sweet, intoxicating flavor. Banana leaf

& animal, being & nonbeing. In fact,

craving wisdom, he bites into memory.

The President of the United States of America

thumbs the pages slowly, moving from reverie

to reverie, learning why one envies the octopus

for its ink, how a man’s skin becomes the final page.

Harriet Tubman

by Eloise Greenfield

Harriet Tubman didn’t take no stuff

Wasn’t scared of nothing neither

Didn’t come in this world to be no slave

And wasn’t going to stay one either

“Farewell!” she sang to her friends one night

She was mighty sad to leave ‘em

But she ran away that dark, hot night

Ran looking for her freedom

She ran to the woods and she ran through the woods

With the slave catchers right behind her

And she kept on going till she got to the North

Where those mean men couldn’t find her

Nineteen times she went back South

To get three hundred others

She ran for her freedom nineteen times

To save Black sisters and brothers

Harriet Tubman didn’t take no stuff

Wasn’t scared of nothing neither

Didn’t come in this world to be no slave

And didn’t stay one either

And didn’t stay one either

© 2012, Academy of American Poets. All Rights Reserved.