high/yellow/black/girl
walken like the sun u be.
The Anita of the title is Sanchez’s daughter. The language, spelling and tone of this poem stands in contrast to the bulk of her verse. Even the rhythm seems just a little off-model relative to other works. But in relation to its celebration of her daughter and the rebellious attitude the subject of the poem has struck, it is a perfect fit. This quality is symmetrical with the overwhelming number of poems making up the canon of Sanchez. She is a poet who is very adept at matching form to content.
1. Your limbs buried
in northern muscle carry
their own heartbeat2. Mississippi...
alert with
conjugated pain
Sanchez is fond of longer poems that are broken up into individual stanzas of shorter poetic forms like tanka or, as with this example, haiku. As indicated by the title, the entire work spans fourteen stanzas, each an individual work of haiku in itself. It is a marvelously expressive way of writing poetry made all the more impressive by the strict formal rules of the haiku form.
This was a migration unlike
the 1900s of black men and women
coming north for jobs. freedom. life.
this was a migration to begin
to bend a father’s heart again
to birth seduction from the past
To repay desertion at last.
Standing in direct opposition to the many singular and individual haikus which Sanchez has written are books like Does Your House Have Lions? This is more like a novel written in verse and is separated into four sections, each told by a different family member: sister, brother, father and family members/ancestors. These are the opening words to the book which will launch a coherent narrative looked at from different perspective. That narrative is the tragic and sad story of the brother’s death from AIDS.
i didn't know bobby
hutton in fact it is
too hard to re
cord all the dying
young/blks.
in this country.
but this i do know
A perfect example of the many ways in which Sanchez experiments with the basic construction of verse are these opening lines from “Memorial.” A definite musicality is signified by the guided expressions of the author. One need not know the specifics of musical composition to fall right into the rhythmic pattern the speaker intends. This example does not stand alone or apart from the rest of Sanchez’s verse. Throughout her career can see an evolution not just in topics or literary devices, but the most basic principle of poetry: how it looks on the printed page and sounds when spoken out loud.
