Our Ancestors Are An Ever Widening Circle

A Dead Hydrangea Is As Intricate And Lovely As One In Bloom. Bleak Sky Is As Seductive As Sunshine, Miniature Orange Trees Without Blossom Or Fruit Are Not Defective; They Are That.

Black Women Are The Touchstone By Which All That Is Human Can Be Measured.

Love Is Never Any Better Than The Lover. Wicked People Love Wickedly, Violent People Love Violently, Weak People Love Weakly, Stupid People Love Stupidly, But The Love A Free Man Is Never Safe. There Is No Gift For The Beloved. The Lover Alone Possesses His Gift Of Love. The Loved One Is Shorn, Neutralized, Frozen In The Glance Of The Lover’s Inward Eyes.

There, In The Center Of That Silence Was Not Eternity But The Death Of Time And A Loneliness So Profound The Word Itself Had No Meaning. For Loneliness Assumed The Absence Of Other People, And The Solitude She Found In That Desperate Terrain Had Never Admitted The Possibility Of Other People. She Wept Then. Tears For The Deaths Of The Littlest Things: The Castaway Shoes Of Children; Broken Stems Of Marsh Grass Battered And Drowned By The Sea; Prom Photographs Of Dead Women She Never Knew; Wedding Rings In Pawnshop Windows; The Tiny Bodies Of Cornish Hens In A Nest Of Rice.

A Little Black Girl Yearns For The Blue Eyes Of A Little White Girl, And The Horror At The Heart Of Her Yearning Is Exceeded Only By The Evil Of Fulfillment