Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
...
My desire
is always the same; wherever Life
deposits me:
I want to stick my toe
...
When they torture your mother
plant a tree
When they torture your father
plant a tree
...
Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
...
(You supply the pictures!)
I get to meditate
in a chair!
Or against the wall
with my legs
...
Going out to the garden
this morning
to plant seeds
for my winter greens
...
Did you ever understand this?
If my spirit was poor, how could I enter heaven?
Was I depressed?
Understanding editing,
...
Don’t be like those who ask for everything:
praise, a blurb, a free ride in my rented
limousine. They ask for everything but never offer
anything in return.
...
If I was President
The first thing I would do
is call Mumia Abu-Jamal.
No,
...
Before I leave the stage
I will sing the only song
I was meant truly to sing.
...
When you see water in a stream
you say: oh, this is stream
water;
When you see water in the river
...
Knowing you might some day come
and how unprepared I’ve always
been
like Mr. Sloppy
...
The tree of life
has fallen on my small house.
I thought it was so much bigger!
But it is not.
...
When you thought me poor,
my poverty was shaming.
When blackness was unwelcome
we found it best
...
Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. Her father, who was, in her words, "wonderful at math but a terrible farmer," earned only $300 a year from sharecropping and dairy farming. Her mother supplemented the family income by working as a maid.She worked 11 hours a day for USD $17 per week to help pay for Alice to attend college. Living under Jim Crow Laws, Walker's parents resisted landlords who expected the children of black sharecroppers to work the fields at a young age. A white plantation owner said to her that black people had “no need for education.” Minnie Lou Walker said, "You might have some black children somewhere, but they don’t live in this house. Don’t you ever come around here again talking about how my children don’t need to learn how to read and write.” Her mother enrolled Alice in first grade at the age of four. Growing up with an oral tradition, listening to stories from her grandfather (the model for the character of Mr. in The Color Purple), Walker began writing, very privately, when she was eight years old. "With my family, I had to hide things," she said. "And I had to keep a lot in my mind." In 1952, Walker was accidentally wounded in the right eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers. Because the family had no car, the Walkers could not take their daughter to a hospital for immediate treatment. By the time they reached a doctor a week later, she had become permanently blind in that eye. When a layer of scar tissue formed over her wounded eye, Alice became self-conscious and painfully shy. Stared at and sometimes taunted, she felt like an outcast and turned for solace to reading and to writing poetry. When she was 14, the scar tissue was removed. She later became valedictorian and was voted most-popular girl, as well as queen of her senior class, but she realized that her traumatic injury had some value: it allowed her to begin "really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out". After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred to Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, graduating in 1965. Walker became interested in the U.S. civil rights movement in part due to the influence of activist Howard Zinn, who was one of her professors at Spelman College. Continuing the activism that she participated in during her college years, Walker returned to the South where she became involved with voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights, and children's programs in Mississippi. Activism Alice Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in Atlanta in the early 1960s. Walker credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist for the Civil Rights Movement. She marched with hundreds of thousands in August in the 1963 March on Washington. As a young adult, she volunteered to register black voters in Georgia and Mississippi. On March 8, 2003, International Women's Day, on the eve of the Iraq War, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior; and Terry Tempest Williams, author of An Unspoken Hunger; were arrested along with 24 others for crossing a police line during an anti-war protest rally outside the White House with her dogs. Walker and 5,000 activists associated with the organizations Code Pink and Women for Peace, marched from Malcolm X Park in Washington D.C. to the White House. The activists encircled the White House. In an interview with Democracy Now, Walker said, "I was with other women who believe that the women and children of Iraq are just as dear as the women and children in our families, and that, in fact, we are one family. And so it would have felt to me that we were going over to actually bomb ourselves." Walker wrote about the experience in her essay, "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For." In November 2008, Alice Walker wrote "An Open Letter to Barack Obama" that was published on Theroot.com. Walker addresses the newly elected President as "Brother Obama" and writes "Seeing you take your rightful place, based solely on your wisdom, stamina, and character, is a balm for the weary warriors of hope, previously only sung about." In January 2009, she was one of over 50 signers of a letter protesting the Toronto Film Festival's "City to City" spotlight on Israeli filmmakers, condemning Israel as an "apartheid regime." In March 2009, Alice Walker traveled to Gaza along with a group of 60 other female activists from the anti-war group Code Pink, in response to the Gaza War. Their purpose was to deliver aid, to meet with NGOs and residents, and to persuade Israel and Egypt to open their borders into Gaza. She planned to visit Gaza again in December 2009 to participate in the Gaza Freedom March. On Jun 23, 2011, she announced plans to participate in an upcoming aid flotilla to Gaza which is attempting to break Israel's naval blockade. Explaining her reasons she cited concern for the children and that she felt that "elders" should bring "whatever understanding and wisdom we might have gained in our fairly long lifetimes, witnessing and being a part of struggles against oppression". Fellow author Howard Jacobson took Walker to task saying that her concern for the children does not justify the flotilla. In a June 2011 interview, Walker described the United States and Israel as "terrorist organizations" stating "When you terrorize people, when you make them so afraid of you that they are just mentally and psychologically wounded for life -- that's terrorism." Personal life In 1965, Walker met Melvyn Roseman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They were married on March 17, 1967 in New York City. Later that year the couple relocated to Jackson, Mississippi, becoming "the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi". They were harassed and threatened by whites, including the Ku Klux Klan. The couple had a daughter Rebecca in 1969. Walker described her in 2008 as "a living, breathing, mixed-race embodiment of the new America that they were trying to forge." Walker and her husband divorced amicably in 1976. Walker and her daughter became estranged. Rebecca felt herself to be more of "a political symbol... than a cherished daughter". She published a memoir entitled Black White and Jewish, expressing the complexities of her parents' relationship and her childhood. Rebecca recalls her teenage years when her mother would retreat to her far-off writing studio while “I was left with money to buy my own meals and lived on a diet of fast food.” Since the birth of Rebecca’s son Tenzin, her mother has not spoken to her because she dared to “question her ideology.” Rebecca has learned that she was cut out of her mother’s will in favor of a distant cousin. In the mid-1990s, Walker was involved in a romance with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman. In 2011 shooting began on Beauty in Truth, a documentary film about Walker's life directed by Pratibha Parmar. Writing career Walker's first book of poetry was written while she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence. She took a brief sabbatical from writing while working in Mississippi in the civil rights movement. Walker resumed her writing career when she joined Ms. magazine as an editor before moving to northern California in the late 1970s. Her 1975 article, In Search of Zora Neale Hurston, published on Ms Magazine, helped revive interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, who inspired Walker's writing and subject matter. In 1973, Walker and fellow Hurston scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered Hurston's unmarked grave in Ft. Pierce, Florida. The women collaborated to buy a modest headstone for the gravesite. In addition to her collected short stories and poetry, Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was published in 1970. In 1976, Walker's second novel, Meridian, was published. The novel dealt with activist workers in the South during the civil rights movement, and closely paralleled some of Walker's own experiences. In 1982, Walker published what has become her best-known work, the novel The Color Purple. About a young troubled black woman fighting her way through not only racist white culture but also patriarchal black culture, it was a resounding commercial success. The book became a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 movie as well as a 2005 Broadway musical. Walker has written several other novels, including The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy (which featured several characters and descendants of characters from The Color Purple). She has published a number of collections of short stories, poetry, and other published work. She expresses the struggles of black people, particularly women, and their lives in a racist, sexist, and violent society. Her writings also focus on the role of women of color in culture and history. Walker is a respected figure in the liberal political community for her support of unconventional and unpopular views as a matter of principle. Her short stories include the 1973 Everyday Use, in which she discusses feminism, racism and the issues raised by young black people who leave home and lose respect for their parents' culture. In 2007, Walker gave her papers, 122 boxes of manuscripts and archive material, to Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. In addition to drafts of novels such as The Color Purple, unpublished poems and manuscripts, and correspondence with editors, the collection includes extensive correspondence with family members, friends and colleagues, an early treatment of the film script for The Color Purple, syllabi from courses she taught, and fan mail. The collection also contains a scrapbook of poetry compiled when Walker was 15, entitled "Poems of a Childhood Poetess". Selected awards and honors Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1983) for The Color Purple National Book Award for Fiction (1983) for The Color Purple O. Henry Award for "Kindred Spirits" 1985. Honorary Degree from the California Institute of the Arts (1995) American Humanist Association named her as "Humanist of the Year" (1997) The Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts The Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the Merrill Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship The Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman's Club of New York Induction to the California Hall of Fame in The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts (2006) Domestic Human Rights Award from Global Exchange (2007))
Expect Nothing
Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.
Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.
Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
I am very touched by, and enjoyed your poem Blessed are the poor in spirit. It managed to say something I have been trying to communicate for some time now.
Amazing Author! Her novel, ''The Color Purple, '' Won both the Pulitzer prize and The American book award.
Good advice on living frugally when you have little. Great!
Wonderful poetess Alice Walker is ranked #74 on top 500 poets on date 05 November 2020. Her poems are truly gems and beautiful. We feel very happy reading her poems. She has created a memorable history through her perseverance.
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names.
It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are.
If I could live as a tree, as a river, as the moon, as the sun, as a star, as the earth, as a rock, I would. ...Writing permits me to experience life as any number of strange creations.
Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.
The original "crime" of "niggers" and lesbians is that they prefer themselves.
It seems our fate to be incorrect ... and in our incorrectness stand.
Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.
It seems our fate to be incorrect (look where we live, for example), and in our incorrectness stand.
The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.
The good news may be that Nature is phasing out the white man, but the bad news is that's who She thinks we all are.
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.
Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.
this is not a poem…in fact most of alice waker's 'poems' are not poems. these do not speak to me, nor do they touch me, intrigue me or mean something. to all of you who look at these poems and believe they have some deep and revolutionary meaning, think again. all this stuff it just sounds like political nagging and complaint, and frankly its tiring me. just because she has some sort of an important name does not make her every product a piece of art. wake up people! think for yourselves for a moment, if i told you that her poems were made by a five year old you would not take it seriously right? so why act as if these are master pieces? ? they're not! i like poems, i love it when they are smart, rhyme, cute, or sad, painful, depressing or even modern poems i don't mind, but this… this is ridiculous.