Carolyn Marie Rodgers (December 14, 1940, Chicago, Illinois – April 2, 2010, Chicago, Illinois) was a Chicago-based American poet and a 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. Later, Rodgers began writing her own works, which grappled with black identity and culture in the late 1960s. Rodgers was a leading voice of the Black Arts Movement and authored nine books, including How I got Ovah (1975). She was also an essayist and critic, and her work has been described as delivered in a language rooted in a black female perspective that wove strands of feminism, black power, spirituality, and writerly self-consciousness into a sometimes raging, sometimes ruminative search for identity.)
Testament
child,
in the august of your life
you come barefoot to me
the blisters of events
having worn through to the
soles of your shoes.
it is not the time
this is not the time
there is no such time
to tell you
that some pains ease away
on the ebb & toll of
themselves.
there is no such dream that
can not fail, nor is hope our
only conquest.
we can stand boldly in burdening places (like earth here)
in our blunderings, our bloomings
our palms, flattened upward or pressed,
an unyielding down.