Before she became the famous author of The Color Purple, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Alice Walker was a poet. Since 1968, she has regularly been publishing books of poetry that are, in a word, striking. Much like her prose, Alice Walker’s poetry is direct and accessible, yet it packs an incredible amount of emotion and passion.
Alice Walker has published 9 volumes of poems, including Once (1968); Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973); Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (1979); Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985); Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991); Absolute Trust in the Goodness of Earth (2003); A Poem Traveled Down My Arm (2003); Hard Times Require Furious Dancing (2010); The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers (2013); and Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (2018).
Keep reading to discover a few of our favorite Alice Walker poems.
Once
Alice Walker’s first book of poetry, Once, was published in 1968. Comprised of poems written while she was still a student at Sarah Lawrence and during her first visit to Africa, Once is an enduring, witty snapshot of a young Alice Walker’s mind.
THE KISS
i was kissed once
by a beautiful man
all blond and
czech
riding through bratislava
on a motor bike
screeching “don’t yew let me fall off heah naow!”
the funny part was
he spoke english
and setting me gallantly
on my feet
kissed me for
not anyhow looking
like aunt jemima.
Related: 20 Best Love Poems of All Time
Revolutionary Petunias
A National Book Award finalist, these verses published in 1976 are Alice Walker’s most visceral reactions to the Civil Rights movement, a period that she herself influenced through words and advocacy.
Expect Nothing
Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
Become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.
Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.
Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful
The title of this collection comes from a Native American shaman who, reflecting on the terrible problems brought by white colonizers, nearly forgave them all because with the settlers came horses to the North American Plains. “This book has two fine strengths—a music that comes along sometimes [and] Walker’s own tragicomic gifts” (The New York Times Book Review).
LISTEN
Listen,
I never dreamed
I would learn to love you so.
You are as flawed
as my vision
As short tempered
as my breath.
Every time you say
you love me
I look for shelter.
But these matters are small.
Lying entranced
by your troubled life
within as without your arms
I am once again
Scholarly.
Studying a way
that is not mine.
Proof of evolution’s
variegation.
You would choose
not to come back again,
you say.
Except perhaps
as rock or tree.
But listen, love. Though human,
that is what you are
already
to this student, absorbed.
Human tree and rock already,
to me.
Related: The Best Sad Poetry Books
Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart
In the introduction of her most recent book of poetry, Alice Walker writes that “no one escapes a time in life when the arrow of sorrow, of anger, of despair pierces the heart.” In this collection, Alice Walker’s poems are bilingual—each is printed in both English and Spanish.
Wherever You Are Grieving
It does not matter to me:
wherever you are grieving
whether Paris, Damascus, Jerusalem, Bamako,
Mexico or Beirut or New York City
my heart, too, is bruised
and dragging.
There used to be such a thing
as melodrama
when feeling could be made up,
but now there is bare pain
and sorrow,
a sense of endlessly missed
opportunities
to smile and embrace
“The other.”
We mourn the loss
of goodness
that was so divinely
ordinary:
babyhood
youth
the blessings of maturity
and of old age.
All sacrificed now
almost predictably
to the same Greed
our histories
—every one of them—
could have warned us against
if only we knew them.
Keep Reading:
8 Stunning Poetry Collections Like Milk and Honey
Revisiting The Color Purple: A Discussion with Alice Walker
Alice Walker Tells Readers: Don't Despair
