Harlem Sweeties by Langston Hughes

Have you dug the spill   

Of Sugar Hill?

Cast your gims

On this sepia thrill:   

Brown sugar lassie,   

Caramel treat,   

Honey-gold baby   

Sweet enough to eat.   

Peach-skinned girlie,   

Coffee and cream,   

Chocolate darling   

Out of a dream.   

Walnut tinted

Or cocoa brown,   

Pomegranate-lipped   

Pride of the town.   

Rich cream-colored   

To plum-tinted black,   

Feminine sweetness   

In Harlem’s no lack.   

Glow of the quince   

To blush of the rose.   

Persimmon bronze   

To cinnamon toes.   

Blackberry cordial,   

Virginia Dare wine—

All those sweet colors   

Flavor Harlem of mine!   

Walnut or cocoa,   

Let me repeat:

Caramel, brown sugar,   

A chocolate treat.   

Molasses taffy,

Coffee and cream,   

Licorice, clove, cinnamon   

To a honey-brown dream.   

Ginger, wine-gold,   

Persimmon, blackberry,

All through the spectrum

Harlem girls vary—

So if you want to know beauty’s   

Rainbow-sweet thrill,

Stroll down luscious,

Delicious, fine Sugar Hill.

Oh, if one could leave this world for a while...

@_waterlu

I have an Instagram account now.

In 2015 only.

Anyway, let's connect!

link: Lu de Leeuw

Re-read

White Oleander, Janet Fitch (1999)

This book is one of the very best in lyrical prose.  It opened a whole new world for me as a writer when I first read it about four or five years ago.  It was like finding home: here was a book of fiction in my lap written in a way I had only imagined (and thought unlikely to exist) up until the time.  Everything I had read before was kept "clean, cut" formulaic, "the language simple", but Fitch married poetry and prose in a most splendid manner.  More importantly to me — like Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, et al. — she was another writer who affirmed my pen; they continue to tutor me in the ways of writing not-so-beautiful stories beautifully, daringly.  The grotesque, the ordinary, and seemingly minor can indeed be depicted picturesquely.

This excerpt is in the voice of the novel's narrator Astrid about her poet/scorned/murderer mother: 

"I didn't want to remind her that I was the reason she was trapped in electric bills and kid's shoes grown too small [...] She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot.  I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress."