Morning Haiku Paperback - 2011

14 haiku (for Emmett Louis Till)

1.
Your limbs buried
in northern muscle carry
their own heartbeat

2.
Mississippi…
alert with
conjugated pain

3.
young Chicago
stutterer whistling
more than flesh

4.
your pores
wild stars embracing
southern eyes

5.
foot prints blooming
in the night remember
your blood

6.
in this southern
classroom summer settles
into winter

7.
i hear your
pulse swallowing
neglected light

8.
your limbs
fly off the ground
little birds…

9.
we taste the
blood ritual of
southern hands

10.
blue midnite
breaths sailing on
smiling tongues

11.
say no words
time is collapsing
in the woods

12.
a mother’s eyes
remembering a cradle
pray out loud

13.
walking in Mississippi
i hold the stars
between my teeth

14.
your death
a blues, i could not
drink away.

“Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature’s forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly.”
—Maya Angelou
 
“Only a poet with an innocent heart can exorcise so much pain with so much beauty.”
—Isabel Allende
 
“Sonia Sanchez is one of Philadelphia’s most celebrated poets and public figures. . . . She played an important role in the civil-rights and Black Arts movements and has read her poetry all over the world. That poetry is full of history, music, and song.”
—John Timpane, Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Sanchez is at her finest in Morning Haiku. . . . Through the collection, Sanchez gives thanks, praise and meditation to black artists.”
—Tara Murtha, Philadelphia Weekly
 
“The poetry of Sonia Sanchez is full of power and yet always clean and uncluttered. It makes you wish you had thought those thoughts, felt those emotions, and, above all, expressed them so effortlessly and so well.”
—Chinua Achebe

"Her songs of destruction and loss scrape the heart; her praise songs thunder and revitalize. We need these songs for our journey together into the next century."
—Joy Harjo

“Sonia Sanchez’s poetry is a must for all readers. Period.”
—Essence

“Sanchez’s haiku is as simple and clear as breathing, but with everything that brings energy and vivacity to being alive.”
—Rain Taxi Review of Books 

Sonia Sanchez is poet, activist, scholar, and formerly the Laura Carnell Professor of English and Women's Studies at Temple University, and is currently a poet-in-residence there. Her numerous honors include the American Poetry Society's 2018 Wallace Stevens Award. she is the author of sixteen books, including Like the Singing Coming off the Drums, Does Your House Have Lions?, Wounded in the House of a Friend, Shake Loose My Skin, and Morning Haiku.