The Iowa Review
Volume 6
Issue 2 Spring: Black Writing
Article 4
1975
Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning
Alice Walker
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Walker, Alice. "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning." The Iowa Review 6.2 (1975): 2-3. Web.
Available at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview/vol6/iss2/4
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I was
a
boy then, running
to Pa)
(unbeknownst
Miss
errands for
Jackie
and Stack-o'-Diamonds'
..
.Their
perfumes,
faces.
rouged Egyptian
Their pianolas
O Creole
Dixie
Eula Mae.
jazzing.
babies,
odalisques,
speeding through cutglass
dark to see the macho angel
trick you'd never
turn, his bluesteel
prowess
in the ring.
Hardshell
amen'd
as God
beHevers
the wreck
A'mighty's
I'd thought
such gaiety could not
die. Nor could our
will.
elegant
avenger.
The Virgin Forest
by Rousseau
flowers
its psychedelic
its
deathless
towering,
dark dream-figure
death the leopard
claws?I
choose it
now as
elegy
for Tiger Flowers.
"Good Night, Willie Lee, 111See You in the
Morning" / Alice Walker
Looking down
dead face
for the last time
into my
father's
2
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said without
my mother
smiles
tears, without
without
regrets
but with civiHty
"Good night, WilHe Lee, 1*11see you
in the morning."
And it was then I knew that the healing
of all our wounds
is
forgiveness
that permits a promise
of our return
at the end.
Leaving Eden / Ralph A. Dickey
Named
and unnamed
armed
and unarmed
I have my covenant
in the
solitary
and renamed
and disarmed
outside
confinement
the womb
of my
cells
cries of my bones
like the cries of animals
followed me out of my mother
The
into exile
Butterfly Piece / Robert Hayden
(for Robert Stilwell)
as
static and
butterflies,
perfect
enamelwork
Jewel corpses fixed
by Faberg?.
in
flower-skin
Black
banded
opal
glass.
BraziHan
neargold
yellow;
sea-agate
striped berylgreen:
Colors so intense I imagine them heavy enough
to have broken the Kve wings?as
human
colors in our inhuman world burden, break.
Occult
prismatic blue of the morpho,
the great prized morpho
that Hving seems
hands.
Wild beauty
conjured up by magic
killed to prettify.
3