Celebrating poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks during National Poetry Month

A Song in the Front Yard

by Gwendolyn Brooks

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.

I want a peek at the back

Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.   

A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now   

And maybe down the alley,

To where the charity children play.   

I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.

They have some wonderful fun.

My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine

How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.   

My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae   

Will grow up to be a bad woman.

That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late

(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.

And I’d like to be a bad woman, too,

And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace   

And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000), an African-American poet, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 and was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968.According to Wikipedia, "Brooks published her first poem in a children's life box at the age of thirteen. By the time she was sixteen, she had compiled a portfolio of around 75 published poems. At seventeen, she started submitting her work to "Lights and Shadows", the poetry column of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. Her poems, many published while she attended Wilson Junior College, ranged in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to poems using blues rhythms in free verse. Her characters were often drawn from the poor of the inner city." "A Song in the Front Yard" is from selected poems copy written in 1963. In 1985 Brooks was the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.