Maker-of-Sevens in the scheme of thingsFrom earth to star;Thy cycle holds whatever is fate, andOver the border the bar.Though rank and fierce the marinerSailing the seven seas,He prays, as he holds ... [+]
Harlem Renaissance poet and activist Anne Bethel Scales Bannister Spencer was born on a Virginia farm in 1882. The daughter of former slaves, Spencer’s mother enrolled her in school for the first time when she was 11, at the Virginia Theological Seminary and College (now Virginia University of Lynchburg). Six years later, Spencer graduated as valedictorian. Though she lived in Virginia her whole life, she maintained close friendships with many Harlem Renaissance writers, including James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and W.E.B. Du Bois. She worked with Johnson and others to establish the Lynchburg chapter of the NAACP and served for 20 years as the librarian for Dunbar High School.
Spencer’s poetry engages themes of religion, race, and the natural world. She was the first African American woman poet to be featured in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973).
Maker-of-Sevens in the scheme of thingsFrom earth to star;Thy cycle holds whatever is fate, andOver the border the bar.Though rank and fierce the marinerSailing the seven seas,He prays, as he holds ... [+]
We trekked into a far country,My friend and I.Our deeper content was never spoken,But each knew all the other said.He told me how calm his soul was laidBy the lack of anvil and strife.“The wooing ... [+]
Gay little Girl-of-the-Diving-Tank,I desire a name for you,Nice, as a right glove fits;For you—who amid the malodorousMechanics of this unlovely thing,Are darling of spirit and form.I know you—a ... [+]
Lady, Lady, I saw your face, Dark as night withholding a star . . . The chisel fell, or it might have been You had borne so long the yoke of men. Lady, Lady, I saw your hands, Twisted, awry ... [+]