Poetry

IN “KITCHENETTE BUILDING,” Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, considers the challenge of dreaming in grim places. The setting of this 1945 poem, published as part of Brooks’ first collection, A Street in Bronzeville, is the titular kitchenette building, a housing unit of many cramped, run-down apartments, often rented by Black residents in that era in cities like Chicago. Tenants are “grayed in, and gray,” worn out by systemic injustice and the demands of daily life, such as paying rent and putting food on the table. Still, the speaker — who speaks on the behalf of a collective “we” — wonders if a dream could rise “through onion fumes” and “sing an aria” in the building.

The dream in “kitchenette building” is delicate and “fluttering,” something that requires time and contemplation — luxuries that systemic oppression makes nearly impossible. Brooks’ biographer, Angela Jackson, in A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks, describes this poignantly: “Life is grim in these kitchenette buildings ... entrapment as in a prison. People here are not people; they are things, dehumanized by the nature of a system they did not volunteer for.” Later, she asserts that kitchenette residents “cannot even consider” a dream greater than a cold bath “[before] a realistic necessity comes up ... They take what they can get.”

Brooks makes it clear, though: Imagination is a vital precursor to liberation. “Kitchenette building” plants seeds in questions: What would happen if dreams of freedom and freshness had space to grow? What would liberation look like for Black communities and the U.S. as a whole?

IN HER REFLECTION on the work of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, Sarah James sees Brooks’ poetry as asserting “our collective right to dream of a humane world.” At Sojourners, we ground our “dream of a humane world” in God’s dream for all creation to thrive — each sparrow, each planet, each one of us. And yet, our adversary attempts to occupy our souls like a “roaring lion” (1 Peter 5:8). It’s not just you who is overwhelmed, destabilized, scared. We mark five years of living with covid-19, as Céire Kealty reflects. President Trump is staging an all-out attack on immigrant families, as Ken Chitwood reports, while churches work to offer protection in the face of harsh deportation policies. When surrounded by the deafening “roaring lion,” it’s tempting to become small and defensive. But, as Edgar Rivera Colón writes in our cover feature, God invites us into life-giving soul work to sustain us in risky love and activism. Even when our hearts are shattered, God is ready to fuse them together. Just ask. Brooks wrote, “Life is for us, and is shining. / We have a right to sing.” Let’s be like the sparrows and sing.

I once believed I could hate intermittently,
an incandescence I could turn on and off
with the will or guide with the pressure
of my knees or with reins woven
from the clear demands of the moment.

Scriptural Time Travel

For the average reader, understanding scripture’s historical context can be overwhelming. Hosted by scholar Helen Bond and journalist Dave Roos, the podcast Biblical Time Machine provides an accessible entry point into biblical scholarship. Episode topics include slavery among early Christians and first-century childhood.  BibleOdyssey

Surely I betrayed her at least three times:
eighteen months of bone-grinding hip pain,

a list of life stories never recorded, and
leaving her exposed to suffering because

I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was so hard to die.
The cock’s crow was just basic kidney physiology,

Dome of the rock
dome of the belly

every diaphragm
its own firmament

waters above
from waters below

eyeglasses flecked with salt spots
remnants of our oceans

“DO YOU MAKE any money from it?” a visitor asked as we walked behind my house, where goats, chickens, fruits, and vegetables grow among the weeds. I shook my head and laughed.

We entered the garden where my 74-year-old father knelt, breaking up soil with an old cultivating fork. He was planting spindly tomato plants I had started from seed and almost abandoned.

We don’t make money from it, but the garden is the place where my father cultivates joy. When I was a child, he poured water on rows of collards to wash away stressful days working for a Washington, D.C., nonprofit. Gardening restores his soul. These days, Dad splits his time between my parents’ home in Ohio and my home in rural Georgia, planting gardens in both places.

We don’t weigh the bushels of okra, cantaloupe, peppers, watermelon, and beans to see if they equal or surpass expenditures of time or money spent on Dad’s trips down South. Some work can’t be measured in dollars.

WHEN EMILY DICKINSON first read the novel Jane Eyre, she didn’t know the name of its author. At the time, Charlotte Brontë wrote under the pseudonym Currer Bell, and her work was the subject of controversy. The British Quarterly Review referred to Bell as “a person who ... combines a total ignorance of the habits of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion” and said, “the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine ... is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.”

When Dickinson returned Jane Eyre to the friend who lent it to her, she sent it with a bouquet of box leaves and a note that makes it clear she’d heard the gossip on Bell. She wrote, “If all these leaves were altars, and on every one a prayer that Currer Bell might be saved — and you were God — would you answer it?” Years later, when Brontë died, Dickinson wrote the following elegy: “Oh, what an afternoon for heaven, / When ‘Brontë’ entered there!”

As Dickinson’s biographer Alfred Habegger notes, this elegy not only grants Brontë salvation but also “made heaven the beneficiary.” Even in these brief notes on Brontë, we can see some of the common themes of Dickinson’s poetry. There is the impulse to engage with (and even affirm) the ideas of God and heaven but also the impulse to subvert rigid and exclusive notions of theology.