Happy birthday, Ms Giovanni!

Nikki Giovanni was born today in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1943. I went to school in Maryville, a few kilometres from Knoxville. Wikipedia says that "on April 17, 2007, at the Virginia Tech Convocation commemorating the April 16 Virginia Tech massacre, Giovanni closed the ceremony with a chant poem, intoning:

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on. We are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech... We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibilities, we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness, we are the Hokies. We will prevail, we will prevail, we will prevail. We are Virginia Tech."

"Giovanni's writing has been heavily inspired by African-American activists and artists. She has a tattoo with the words 'Thug life' to honor Tupac Shakur, whom she admired. Her book 'Love Poems' (1997) was written in memory of him, and she has stated that she would 'rather be with the thugs than the people who are complaining about them.' She also tours nationwide and frequently speaks out against hate-motivated violence. At a 1999 Martin Luther King Day event, she recalled the 1998 murders of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard: 'What's the difference between dragging a black man behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, and beating a white boy to death in Wyoming because he's gay?'"
[source...]

When I Die

when i die i hope no one who ever hurt me cries
and if they cry i hope their eyes fall out
and a million maggots that had made up their brains
crawl from the empty holes and devour the flesh
that covered the evil that passed itself off as a person
that i probably tried
to love.
__________

---

Nikki Giovanni