Carolyn Marie Rodgers (December 14, 1940 – April 2, 2010) was an American poet. Rodgers was the founder of one of America’s oldest and largest black presses, Third World Press. She got her start in the literary circuit as a young woman studying under Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks in the South Side of Chicago.
ETHIOPIA
Carolyn Marie Rodgers
cradle of the Black Madonna, oh
dark Maria—
hunger falls on you
like a gardener’s rake falls
on rich, black soil,
for growing crops, but instead of harvests,
you weep for rain, hunger, and you birth death.
your children are
pop-eyed, bird-eyed little Lazaruses,
scarecrow limp,
bodies, testaments to emptiness,
eating itself full to death.
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THE TRANSLATION OF EVE
Carolyn Marie Rodgers
and flesh had breath. a soul began to be. the rise and eve’s of my
eve-ness. even. balance. man. now, wo-man, even me. Lord. even me … Eve.
the beginning of yeses and no’s.
the paradigm of mourning and sorrow.
a door opened and another one closes. prayers, and the “we wish,”
forever, transformed.
Transformation.
So then, what is the life but a genealogy of ways.
ways, like silver and golden leaves on a madrigal tree, singing,
drifting and falling away. into tongues …
and the i am is illuminated. the i am of every man. not the great
I AM of forevermore, but the small everyman. and then, after the
heels of our souls have been bruised. a crucifixion. a resurrection.
a Transfiguration. and the translations began again.
and now our breath leaves flesh and yet here is the consciousness of
mystery, reformed, informed.
our endings are all reborn.
like the we wish, the beginnings and the endings, the life, eternity,
forever, transformed.