Early on, Brooks displayed a finely tuned, yet accessible poetic vision. A favorite, “The Mother” (1945), looks into the mind of a woman troubled by repressed grief for aborted non-babies. Composed in somewhat artificial rhymed couplets, the text breaks into a liberating candor with the emergence of “I” in the second stanza. As though suffering wavelike contractions, the speaker moves to confession in line 21. With a late-developing reverence for life, the speaker acknowledges through repetition a regret that her lost children “were never made.”
A lyric sequence, The Womanhood (1949), draws on structured questions about motherhood. The second stave, “The Children of the Poor,” uses the fourteen-line Petrarchan stanza to frame questions of legacy. Implicit in a cry against judgments of “my sweetest lepers” is the mother’s self-blame for giving birth to children condemned as “quasi, contraband.” Out of kilter is the coming of age of her “little halves” in autumn, when their fruits freeze before ripening. Segueing to a conclusion with “True,” she notes that blacks intent on being less black miss the “silver” under their darkness and never pause to mine a “treasure of stars.”
On the outer edge of the coming civil revolt, “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi” (1960) expresses through melodramatic urgency a miscarriage of justice in a nation where “Nothing and nothing could stop Mississippi.” The poem narrates a vignette in which a white woman dwells apart from the “milk-white maids” and dashing prince-rescuers of anthologized verse. As she prepares breakfast for her family, she mourns the demonizing of a young black teen, yet watches as a malodorous hatred, “big / Bigger than all magnolias” engulfs her family. In reply to the poem’s high drama, “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmet Till” (1960) closes obliquely on the victim’s mother. The starkness of reds and blacks summons a single image: “Chaos in windy grays / through a red prairie.” Heavy with the poet’s conviction that imperfections cloud America’s past glories, the poem anticipates upheaval.
Prefiguring a generation captivated by rap some three decades hence, “We Real Cool” (1960) frames a time line out of street jive, alliterated monosyllables, and the dicer’s roll of seven. Situated “at the Golden Shovel,” the eight-stage litany honors with sharp-edged irony the self-adulating pool sharks. Cool for dropping out of school, cruising the streets, and romancing self-destruction, the deluded males, like self-cloned victims, move from sin to gin to an erotic tease (“Jazz June”) before succumbing to an unnamed killer. A flip warning, the poem throws back in the faces of knowing teens the premature death that becomes an eighth player in their trite street drama.
