Jessie Mitchell’s mother – Gwendolyn Brooks

Another poem from the excellent ‘You Better Believe It: Black Verse in English’. The editor of this 1973 anthology, Paul Breman, tells me – or anyone else who wants to read his intro – that Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Kansas in 1917 but lived in Chicago all her life. She was says Brennan, “easily the most interesting of the early generation of female black poets”. Poemhunter.com tells me she died in 2000.

 

Into her mother’s bedroom to wash the ballooning body.
‘My mother is jelly-hearted and she has a brain of jelly:
Sweet, quiver-soft, irrelevant. Not essential.
Only a habit would cry if she should die.