A Haiku for Sister Sonia Sanchez
In a place called Birmingham, Alabama, as you might say in that wondering way, you were born in 1934. I don’t know what hospital and I don’t know what time. But I know that you were born. And born. And born. My dear sister, your birth was an explosion of possibility and light. What words were in you even then, 87 years ago on the birthing table? What poetry in your mother’s safe blood?
In a place called Birmingham, Alabama, I was born in 1990 at UAB hospital, but I don’t know what time. It isn’t on my birth certificate for some curious reason. My mom doesn’t remember because she birthed four kids—who has time to focus on the time? What mattered was that I was born.
In a place called Birmingham, Alabama, I first heard your name. I first learned what a big, bright life you have lived and are living—the writing, the activism, the loud voice in a small body, the activism, the teaching, the mothering, the activism–—I learned that the steps I followed held the shape of your feet.
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Sonia Sanchez is a pillar of Black poetry in the United States and otherwise—she is synonymous with the fighting will of a poet’s heart, the screaming desire of a Black voice to be heard. Her career has been one full of political activism, poetic exploration, self-reflection, and the beating blood of all of us who wish to birth freedom on planet earth.
A Black woman is always the birthplace of a Good Thing, and Sister Sonia is no different—and maybe I should say right now, I will refer to her as Sister Sonia frequently in this essay because that’s how she refers to every person she meets: Sister this, Brother that, my dear sister, my dear brother. She actively creates the global family about which she writes and speaks—as her poem says, she ‘put[s] on the sleeves of love’ in every way.
Born Wilsonia Benita Driver, Sonia Sanchez is a multi-genre author who has published over twenty books of poetry, plays, and children’s books. She has taught at universities across the nation, and she has won many awards, including the Wallace Stevens Award, the Edward MacDowell Meda,l and the Jackson Poetry Prize. Her work at San Francisco State University and in the Bay Area in the 1960s was pivotal in the development of Black Studies as a scholarly course of study at the university level in the United States.
I first learned about Sonia Sanchez in an African American Literature course in my undergraduate English degree program–our professor, Dr. Jacqueline Wood, is one of the foremost Sonia Sanchez scholars in the United States. We read a few of Sanchez’s plays, and I was awakened to the importance of the Black Arts Movement, of which Sonia Sanchez was a part. This movement created a clearly defined and unmistakable (in voice, in power, in soul) lane in which Black poets, singers, playwrights, and artists of all kinds could practice their art and make a political statement. Notable voices from this movement include Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Etheridge Knight, and Nikki Giovanni. Born after the assassination of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (fka Malcolm X) in 1965, the Black Arts Movement was ‘the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept,’ according to Black Arts Movement poet Larry Neal. The major goal of the movement was to create a politically militant, intense, vibrant, and unmistakably Black landscape of poetry. Poets in this movement wrote about discrimination and racism unflinchingly. Although the Black Arts Movement, like many male-led movements, sometimes bent toward misogyny and sexism, Sister Sonia brought an outspoken feminine perspective to this group, and what remains in her work from the Movement is her unflinching approach to the truth and her commitment to equality.
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Black people in America have confronted ‘American tradition’ with our own reimaginings for centuries. Simply creating a life here in this nation after being trafficked, enslaved, murdered, raped, and degraded is a testament to the necessity and power of Black imagination. For example, what we now call ‘soul food’ is a reimagining of African dishes and also a response to being given the scraps and leavings from the master’s table. We had to survive, and that survival is nothing to be discarded or discounted. It is a proud and fulfilling meal. The same seems true of Black poets–we reimagine this language, which was not ours. We reimagine the approach to the page. Phillis Wheatley Peters, the first African American author of a published book of poetry (1773’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral), took the very language which was imposed upon her and created metrical poems which rivaled the work of her white, English-as-first-language speaking counterparts. Wheatley Peters’ work, in many ways, began the documentation of a tradition that was probably already at work in enslaved Africans in America: turning the new words, new worlds, and the many new features of the hellscape of American slavery into something artful and uniquely Black. Gwendolyn Brooks turned traditional form (sonnet) into something more swinging, more syncopated in Gay Chaps at the Bar and even in many of her near-sonnet, near-traditional form poems in her early books. Fast forward to Tyehimba Jess, whose book, Olio, takes the sonnet and throws it into overdrive with his ‘syncopated sonnet’ and ‘sonnet star’ forms. And let’s not even mention his and Patricia Smith’s uses of meter and new forms like Terrance Hayes’ golden shovel (double, in Smith’s case). Black poets always make the form new and more shining than it was when it was given to them. I follow this tradition closely—it is my lineage, and it is a gift to know that anything we touch can become gold—that we can rid it of its colonial stain and throw that sour shell away to reveal the beating and beautiful human hearts we shelter and nurture.
Similarly, Black poets have reimagined the haiku. Although the haiku was originally created as a form for musings on nature in thirteenth-century Japan, Sanchez and other Black poets have ‘spanned the gap between mainstream haiku and the turbulent black literary and social developments in the 20th century: the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, and the Black Arts and Black Power movements’ (Charles Trumbull). Poets like Etheridge Knight and Richard Wright have taken what I perceive as a non-political form (due to its large focus on nature) and used it to distill political and historical concepts into a small container.
Sonia Sanchez’s use of the haiku is very much in line with this tradition. Sanchez’s work in general is characterized by punchy images, song-like repetition, and sometimes meter and form (as in Does Your House Have Lions?, which is written entirely in rhyme royal). Her haiku take all of these elements and press them into three lines or a series of three-lined stanzas. The American haiku is not always beholden to the syllabic constraints of a traditional haiku, but the smallness, the deep and arresting image, and the floating sort of rhythm remain. Sanchez’s ‘14 haiku (for Emmett Louis Till)’ and ‘Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman’ demonstrate this expertly.
Although we know the story of Emmett Till, or we can research it if we aren’t familiar with it, Sanchez’s poem does what all very good poems (documentary poems or otherwise) do: it makes the story breathe and bleed with a human urgency more palpable than what can be found in a history book. The lived experience of being Black and learning what terrorism Emmett Till faced is almost impossible to put into words, even for a poet. I remember the first time I saw his beaten, unrecognizable face. I remember thinking about how it could have been so easy to just let him walk out of that store, whistle or not, and live. I remember learning that Carolyn Bryant actually confirmed that she had made it all up—rage is too small and fear is too flat to contain that feeling. Emmett Till was a child, a beautiful boy who deserved the life God gave him. He deserved the smiles he had not yet smiled, and he deserved to sleep softly through the night without a grown man and his grown friends ripping him up and out of his divine right to live.
In ‘14 haiku (for Emmett Louis Till)’, Sanchez opens a clear and human space for Emmett Till to bloom, for the story to be laid bare and bloody. The poem opens with a direct address to the reality of Emmett’s murder—so often, the way people talk about these sorts of cases decentralizes the idea of murder, fault, and wrongdoing, and instead centralizes the martyr, the social impact, and the resilience of an overpoliced community. It is vital to deal with the body and the hands which murdered it. The murderers cannot escape blame, even in the language we use. In her opening haiku, Sanchez does not only deal in legacy, in spirit-gone-to-heaven, in vengeance-come-from-God, but with the very body and its identity, and with the horror of this sinful act: ‘Your limbs buried / in northern muscle carry / their own heartbeat.’ It is our first introduction to Till, and it is Sanchez’ way of emphasizing the life that mattered. His limbs are buried, yes. They have been transformed into death by the terrible men. But, they maintain their unique personhood—they have ‘northern muscle—’ Till was a Chicago boy, even down in the depths of Mississippi. These limbs which are still so Chicago and still so much more than the lifeless meat those men meant to make him–carry their own heartbeat. Till’s ‘limbs / fly off the ground / little birds—’ they are forever alive. They cannot be killed. The memory of this boy is unending. Even now, we know him. We can see him in all the boys who are murdered by police and by white supremacist terrorists. We see him in the alive Black children who survive, who make it to adulthood to teach their children about his life. Here, the function of the haiku shines—this little tercet gives us a whole universe, a whole history, and the language surprises us with its insistence that the dead can actually be alive.
Each stanza of the poem is a haiku, and this series of haiku create a full and dynamic story of Till, the murder, and even the way in which Till must have captivated all those folks in Money, Mississippi. I think some part of anti-Black violence has to be born from envy, from wide-eyed wonderment at the beauty of Black people. Perhaps, too, from anger when we won’t be knocked down, when we won’t be ashamed of our gorgeous glow, when we won’t ever lower our heads or forget the glory of our ancestors. Sanchez says that Till’s ‘pores [were] / wild stars embracing / southern eyes’ and I think she’s referencing our collective rebuttal to white supremacy. Even our very skin, even the pores in our skin are a sight to behold. Their dazzle captivates all.
Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley makes an appearance in this poem, too—hers is a story that truly changed the whole nation. When her son was murdered, Mamie Till-Mobley allowed Jet Magazine to print a photo of her son’s mangled face. She wanted the country to see what had been done to her child, what horrors lived in the dark corners of America. What horrors lived in the bright open spaces of America. She ensured that a Till was displayed in a glass casket at his funeral so no one could escape the truth of that monstrous beating. A face turned into a bulbous bruise. The strength it takes to bury your child is something I hope I never have to call upon. The strength to bury your child and help launch a nationwide movement for civil rights which was so long overdue is a strength most people just don’t have. Sanchez calls Mamie Till-Mobley into the poem, citing ‘a mother’s eyes / remembering a cradle.’ Just as before, the haiku in Sanchez’s adept hands can take us on a journey through space and time in two lines. Till-Mobley’s eyes remember a cradle, remember a baby and everything that makes a baby—the love, the starlight, the fresh milk scent. Those eyes, with one look, call back the smooth toddler cheek, the first lost tooth, the tears from a playground knee scrape, a giggle before birthday cake, the way two feet learn their way around each other to walk for the very first time. These eyes, Sanchez says, ‘pray out loud.’ Just a look—and if you look at the photos of Mamie Till-Mobley during the trial and the funeral, you’ll see it—just a look can call God and all the angels into the room. I think they can call whatever lies beyond to care for that same boy-child and to exact justice on those who stole him from her.
Sanchez is careful in her creation of this poem—that care is apparent from the form of the poem itself. Haiku allow her to zoom in closely and quietly—she can be intense in her description and delicate in her word choice. And the number of haiku is significant, too—fourteen. Emmett Till was fourteen-years-old when he was murdered in Money, Mississippi. Sanchez honors his life and allows all fourteen years of it to live on the page, year by year. This is another way to create new life for him, another way to make him fully alive, and to recognize just how few years he was able to spend on earth before his murder. I’m constantly bowled over by the detail and intentionality poets employ to deepen the impact of the content and to support the meaning of the poem. Here, we can learn that every single part of the poem must do the work. The form, the line break, the nouns, the verbs, the punctuation—everything in service to the poem’s success.
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I remember the very first moment I knew I was a poet. Harriet Tubman was there.
Of course, I never knew her, but she lives as an ancestor, and her memory impacted me for the first time when I was seven years old.
Imagine me, seven years old and comically congested—I had enlarged tonsils and adenoids as a child, and every breath I took was punctuated with a clot of mucus, with a heaving sigh, with my little mouth, always open. I did not know what it felt like to breathe through my nose, to silently spend my time thinking without the background noise of my heavy breath. I felt strange and ugly underneath all that swollen tissue and the infections that came with it.
Imagine me, seven years old and a lover of all things education—my mom and dad were committed to our educational development from the start. I remember reading books at the age of three, writing my name and simple sentences with my mom at home. I loved all the stories those books held—all the worlds and possibilities they showed me.
Imagine me, seven years old and already going through a racial existential crisis. When I was young, my parents made sure we knew we could be proud of being Black, that we could see Blackness in every single thing: in the princesses and princes we colored in our coloring books, in the stories we wrote for school, in the Santa Claus decoration my dad painted brown, in God. We knew Black was a thing to love, but they also taught us about the history of our people in America. We watched Roots, and to this day I have not been able to watch Kunta Kinte’s foot being chopped off. We read the Addy books from the American Girl series. I wondered, as a child, when the evil people would come and snatch my family in the night. I wondered when someone would hose me down on a Birmingham street. I shied away from books about Black people, afraid of the pain they might reveal. But this, too, shows the importance of teaching full and true history early—we have to know what happened in the past at every age, yes—I was just five when I experienced racism and discrimination personally—but we have to also be committed to teaching the fullness of Black people in our society. We are not just, as I thought in my seven-year-old crisis, only the sum of our pain. Not only the sum of the wrongs done and done again in this country. Not only relevant during February. Not only defined by the oppression of a white patriarchal society. We are so much more. We have a history, and a culture, capacity for joy, rage, love, fear. We are full humans, but little seven-year-old me was struggling with what it meant to hear my parents tell me how wonderful Black was and seeing how the world thought something totally different.
That year, I had an assignment to recite something I’d read to the class, in costume. I had been reading a book of poetry, maybe the first book of poetry I remember ever reading. This book, called Honey, I Love by Eloise Greenfield was such a pivotal text for me, and it illustrates one important role art can play in creating room for equity, justice, and empathy to the self and to others.
Honey, I Love is a children’s book of poetry, and it includes illustrations of Black children and poems from a Black child’s perspective. Each poem addresses a part of the Black child’s family, beliefs, thoughts—their whole existence. Seeing this book full of beautiful, often smiling Black children and seeing the words which seemed so familiar, which expressed what it felt like to be alive and Black in the world meant so much to me. I felt seen, heard, and represented. I felt like I could see myself in the world in a way that acknowledged my joy, my pain, my thoughts—and there was a poem about history. The poem ‘Harriet Tubman’ is in this book, and it was this poem that I chose to recite for my school assignment. I remember, the day of the recitation, standing in front of my class, holding onto the insecurities of my medical condition and my own existential crisis made plentiful. I started to speak, dressed in my white dress and white headscarf: ‘Harriet Tubman didn’t take no stuff, wasn’t scared of nothing, neither. Didn’t come in this world to be no slave, and wasn’t gonna stay one, either.”’And in that moment, I felt so connected to myself and to my ancestors. I understood that my people’s history was not something to fear but something to celebrate—this country could not steal our power or our souls. I could stand, all seven years of me, squarely in the lineage of a freedom fighter like Tubman and answer the call through honoring my artistic voice—the poet inside. That was made possible by a poem. I felt connected to myself and my culture because of a poem. I did not yet know what Audre Lorde had said about poetry and its ability to illuminate our quality of light, our spirit, our souls, but I now know that’s what I felt all those years ago.
And that power is vibrantly on show in Sonia Sanchez’s ‘Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman.’ I wasn’t aware of Sonia Sanchez back in 1997 when I had my Poetic Awakening, but I think it matters that I was a little girl in Birmingham, just as she was, discovering something thrilling about being Black and discovering the thrill of that Blackness represented on the page. I think it’s hard to ignore the connectedness we share as Black poets, and especially as people who have ties to the South. I know Tubman wasn’t from the South but the institution of slavery connects us—again, it’s hard to ignore. There is a power in that kind of legacy and lineage—it’s true that many Black people in America can’t trace our family tree beyond a certain point. The erasure of our records and destruction of our families during slavery ensured that. But we can see our ancestors in the faces of other Black people descended from those who were enslaved. We can see ourselves in Tubman, in Greenfield, in Sanchez—the list goes on. It is a tapestry of infinite power.
Sanchez uses both the haiku and tanka forms in this piece. The tanka form originated in seventh-century Japan, and they were used popularly by men and women engaged in courtship. The tanka also has a sort of volta in the third line, connecting the first two lines to the bottom two lines. Sanchez’s poem is not about romantic love, but instead love and deep admiration for Harriet Tubman, whose fight for Black human rights changed the course of American history.
Much like Sanchez’ series of haiku for Emmett Till, this series of haiku and tanka give blood and breath to Tubman’s memory. She is no longer just a black and white photo in a history book, but she is, instead, a woman ‘rotating / the earth into a shape / of our lives becoming.’ These snapshots of stanzas really create space for Sanchez to scrub out fresh language about Tubman. This is a great byproduct of using formal poetry—although it might not be the ending point, and the poet might not decide to adhere to every last crumb of the rules, some sort of restriction or container can help the poet find those descriptions or turns of phrase that might not have been born otherwise. Three lines make way for something like ‘[p]icture a woman / riding thunder on / the legs of slavery’ and ‘[p]icture a woman / jumping rivers her/ legs inhaling moons,’ images which are so much more explosive than just describing how Tubman ran up on slavery’s heels and through the woods to freedom. Even the word ‘picture’ calls the idea of a snapshot into mind—we are really led to see Tubman beyond what even a traditional photograph could do.
Sanchez then goes further in her picture of Harriet Tubman to actually include Tubman’s own words. These sections, indicated by italics, give Harriet room to speak on the page. The notion that a poet need only invent or observe is an incomplete notion, I think. As poets, we are also called to document and step aside when our poems dictate the need for it. Sanchez’s language is vivid and thrilling on its own, but the moments when the reader can listen to Tubman are wonderful too—the stillness required to hear those words and process them creates a full and living portrait.
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In a place called St. Mary’s City, Maryland, I watched you step off the platform at the train station with your son. That first glimpse of you held so much—I had met you once before, and I had spoken to you on the phone, and those were gifts, of course. I never dreamed you’d know my name. And my poems—
But that first glimpse on that day in March at the train station felt different. Like I was seeing you as a woman for the first time. Not behind a podium, not in a headshot on the back of a book. Not through a screen and not through the eyes of someone who did not know who you were. I imagine all the people riding on that train with you who saw you as just some woman on the train. Just somebody making their way from here to there. But you are so much to so many of us, and in that moment, I saw that you were also a gentle mother, also as careful with your children (birthed and inherited) as you are with your poems. I saw that you were alive.
And that day we spent together—how can I forget it? Those looks you shared with me—the can you believe it and what do you think at meals and as we were taken from place to place. The way you laughed with me, shared histories with me. Even when your head began to hurt that night you made a way to still show up for me—and I was grateful. You, who have shown up for so many of us in seen and unseen ways, you showed up for me. Little Ashley from Birmingham who did not know you’d opened a big door for me to walk through. You stood there at the podium and gave me the award of a lifetime. Didn’t you know that the gift, all along, was just you being here on planet earth exactly as you are?
That night, in the house we shared during our stay, you made me camomile tea. It’s an intimate act, making a meal for someone. Yes, a meal—that little cup of tea was meant to feed my anxious spirit and settle my nerves, ease me into rest after such an exciting day. It was to cloak us both in peaceful sleep. That you desired peace for me is an unmatched kindness. That you boiled the water until it exhaled and let the tea bag steep. That you walked with me around that house to lock the doors and snuff the lights. That you sang that next morning as you readied to leave. That your song is still floating over me and across the whole world—
Here, for you, a haiku:
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the drape of your storied, mother-hands
your teacup, its mouth singing steam,
your small lips ever-ready to explode
Ashley M. Jones is Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama (2022-2026). She holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017), dark / / thing (Pleiades Press 2019), and REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021)