Sims Library of Poetry

Black-owned poetry library & community space in Los Angeles

[simslibraryofpoetry]

"There's a wave where my change sings."

— Amanda Gorman, from Change Sings: A Children's Anthem

Art by Loren Long

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"Watch my olive skin sing songs of a country / I know nothing of."

— Angela Aguirre, from Confessions of a Firework

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"my friends say summer is coming. / they're lying."

— José Olivarez, from Citizen Illegal

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"There is no bus. There is no border. There is no blood. / There are / only sweet corn fields and mango skins."

— Janel Pineda, from Lineage of Rain

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"There is no life I know To compare with pure imagination."

Pure Imagination by Roald Dahl

Happy Birthday to Mister Dahl, who wrote so much of our childhoods!

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"I am literate in wanderlust and a wholehearted need to escape."

Literacy by Nicole Walsh

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"Slide under / sludge, until the caves open and break, and / salt your wounds. and play the black cricket. / and nail on the stars."

— francine j. harris, from play dead

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I can't forgive you. Even if I could, / You wouldn't pardon me for seeing through you. / And yet I cannot cure myself of love / For what I thought you were before I knew you.

— Wendy Cope, from "Defining the Problem," in Serious Concerns

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"We are not friends / because of the laughs / we spend / but the tears / we save"

— Nikki Giovanni from Love Poems

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"How maybe / we are not so different from the leaves. / How maybe we are also always being reborn / to be something more than we once were."

— Clint Smith, from Counting Descent

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new blog post: "Meditations in Grief"

"When it all gets too heavy, I read a poem. I take whatever will have me. Whatever nods back. It doesn't make it easier, but somehow between the moment my brain gets too loud to the last line of a poem, the weight isn't so heavy."

—Sandra Sanchez (@thisismynarrative) from "Meditations in Grief"

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"There is a dream I have in which I

love the world."

—Cameron Awkward-Rich

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"In the dream where I am an island,

I grow green with hope. I'd like to end there."

— Jericho Brown from The Tradition

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"When asked what her (Maha Jaraba) message is to the world, she replies: 'I want the world to know we are here, that we have dreams. We want a better tomorrow, not only to take our share of pain, but also to take our share of life."

-- from "As the bombs fall, I write: The poets of Gaza" by aljazeera

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"please / let her / eat another apple / tomorrow."

from "I Watch Her Eat the Apple" by Natalie Diaz

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poetry in motion

"Poetry is the music of the soul and above all, of great and feeling souls." - voltaire

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the archive: excerpt of "The Cat as We're Leaving" by Andrew Liu

"Through art, we can transcend physical boundaries and freely explore a world that isn't beholden to stay-at-home orders, vaccine rollouts, and pandemic politics. Escapism in this sense is not about dodging responsibilities or shirking obligations in favor of some delusional fantasy world; escapism is a way for us to more meaningfully interact with reality during a time when everything we could always count on, everything we took for granted, has been flipped upside down."

-Anjana Saravanan, from "Andrew Liu's 'The Cat As We're Leaving' & Escapism in the Age of COVID-19"