I Call, You Respond

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A Guest Series Curated by Nicole Rollender. Intro to project here.

 

Call and Response: “Ballad”

Sonia Sanchez is one of the most important writers of the Black Arts Movement and is the author of 16 books. She’s the recipient of the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry and the Langston Hughes Poetry Award. The lyric poem “Ballad” is from Sanchez’s book, Homegirls & Handgrenades.

 

Ballad
(after the spanish)

forgive me if i laugh
you are so sure of love
you are so young
and i too old to learn of love.

the rain exploding
in the air is love
the grass excreting her
green wax is love
and stones remembering
past steps is love,
but you. you are too young
for love
and i too old.

once. what does it matter
when or who, i knew
of love.
i fixed my body
under his and went
to sleep in love
all trace of me
was wiped away

forgive me if i smile
young heiress of a naked dream
you are so young
and i too old to learn of love.

 

RESPONSE # 1: by Jo-Ann Reid

What strikes me about Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sonia Sanchez’s poems is that they essentially “live” in the same place. They capture the profundity of both finding and losing love and how one may see it differently through the lens of age versus experience. Both poets speak to newness and possibility (often embodied in images of young love and in the natural world) while reflecting on the loss of passion (whether fleeting or not) with the fuller knowledge that age ideally brings.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why
(Sonnet XLIII)
Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 – 1950

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

 

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Jo-Ann Reid believes in the way that language, in all its forms, is an invitation to both knowledge and action. The sharing of stories is what makes us who we are.