Sonia Sanchez: Selections

[Jump to poems by publication year: 1990s, 2010s, 2023]

Sonia Sanchez (1934–present) is the author of more than 20 books, including National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Does Your House Have Lions? (Beacon Press, 1997). Sanchez is an artist and activist whose poetry and contributions to Black thought and literature have resulted in documentaries and exhibits on her life and work. A recipient of many honors and awards, including a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 2001 Robert Frost Medal, the 2016 Shelley Memorial Award, the 2018 Wallace Stevens Award, and the Jackson Poetry Prize, Sanchez was selected as Philadelphia’s first poet laureate in 2011.

When the sun yawned and stretched this morning, Sonia Sanchez was eight decades deep into imagining a world where there is justice, peace, and beauty.

—from “The House of Sonia Sanchez,” by Michael Simanga, published in Poetry, April 2023

Sonia Sanchez’s selected poems in order of publication

1990s

“This Is Not a Small Voice” (1995)

... this is a large
voice coming out of these cities.

Published in her 1995 collection Wounded in the House of a Friend (Beacon Press), “This Is Not a Small Voice” is about collectives in a book about collectives. The book’s title refers to a series of lines from the Bible’s Book of Zechariah, all following this pattern of call-and-response: “And one shall say unto him, ‘What are these wounds in thine hands?’ Then he shall answer, ‘Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’” In “This Is Not a Small Voice,” Sanchez stages an argument for the exuberant criticality of Black voices, community care, and the sustenance love provides. At the beginning of the poem, she names the voices making up this large voice “coming out of these cities: This is the voice of LaTanya. / Kadesha. Shaniqua. This / is the voice of Antoine. / Darryl. Shaquille.” This litany conveys the importance of each connecting node’s contribution in making the collective voice. Sanchez moves between negation as an anticipated or a conventional response and an abundant positivity that the poem asserts against it through the structure that the title itself inaugurates: this is not what it is seen as or commonly perceived as or diminished as, this is in fact the richness that the poem describes. The poem also gestures toward the futurity of this love, its far-sightedness, through the lines “this is a love.... [that] feels the / water sails / mends the children, / folds them inside our history,” a love with a strength that endures like iron and a tenderness that is intricate like lace. The poem concludes with a returning address to readers, having charted the anthemic presence and power of “Black Genius,” reminding them that “This is not a small voice / you hear.” 

“For Tupac Amaru Shakur” (1998)

we anoint your life
in this absence
we anoint our tongues
with your magic. your genius.

Written two years after Tupac’s death, this elegy experimentally harnesses all forms grief takes, including anger, disorientation, razor-sharp lyricism, and mourning. Sanchez begins the poem addressing Tupac, writing, “we your mothers wanted to see you safely home. i remembered the poems in your mother’s eyes as she / panther-laced warred against the state,” recalling Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur Davis, and her long political activism as a member of the Black Panther Party. Placing Tupac’s life within “the harsh handbook of Black life,” Sanchez’s poem bristles with conversation with ancestors, with readers, with mothers, with those mourning, and with Tupac himself, creating a whorl of mourning thick with disorientation and sharp with rage. In reckoning with Tupac’s death, the poem crafts an epistemology for the world based on the singer’s own writing and music, writing, “& he says: kai fi African (come here African) / all eyez on ya from the beginning of time / from the beginning of time / resist. / resist. / resist.”

2010s

“Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman” (2018)

Picture her walking,
running, reviving
a country’s breath    ...    

Continuing in her tradition of using form to construct powerful portraits and renditions of Black life and history, Sanchez employs the haiku and tanka forms in this poem toward building, piece by piece or scene by scene, an almost ekphrastic enlivening of Harriet Tubman’s life, cycling through the repetitions of “Picture” and “Imagine” that speak to archival history of the past and invoke Tubman into speculative futurity. The 24 numbered sections of the poem, each three lines long, move chronologically through Tubman’s life, shifting how closely or relationally they examine the depicted scene. Opening with “Picture a woman / riding thunder on / the legs of slavery    ...  ,” Sanchez deftly shifts the aperture and the lens on Tubman through the course of the poem. She uses images, as this opening haiku does, and quotations or speech, such as “Picture her saying: You have within you the strength, / the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars, / to change the world    ...  ”), fashioning a “haiku and tanka” that, even through all its shifts, treats Tubman’s interiority as sacred and inviolable. The closing haiku (“Picture black voices / leaving behind / lost tongues   ...”) departs from the poem’s singular focus on Harriet Tubman, swelling to name the many “black voices” that make the “country’s breath,” the lost traces and tongues that the poem demands into speculative reality, harkening back to the earlier poem “This Is Not a Small Voice” that similarly affirms “this is a big voice,” a big love. 

From the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner folio in Poetry magazine, April 2023

“Belly, Buttocks, and Straight Spines”(2023)

you burn in my throat
i walk your footsteps
Singing.

Before reading this poem at the Split This Rock festival in 2018, Sanchez introduced “Belly, Buttocks, and Straight Spines” as a poem written for contemporary visual artist Wangechi Mutu, known for her collage-like crafting of imagined landscapes and the range of mediums she produces in. Sanchez said in the preamble to her reading, 

I want to begin with a piece that I did for a young woman who's an artist, and she lives in a place called Brooklyn where we can't live anymore because it's so expensive, you know, you know that people have sold out us … the people, New Yorkers, people who retired from teaching or from whatever they were doing and they own brownstones and now they can't afford to pay taxes, you know, so we'll be like—what happens in South Africa—all of us will be living outside on the island and then we'll commute in for work and then at night we leave back out. That's America. That is New York.

Sanchez goes on to describe her process of writing this poem, during which she spent a week making notes and viewing a gallery exhibition of Mutu’s work. Organized into six numbered sections, the poem reflects two exigencies: recognizing Mutu’s inhabitation of a space that Black people are violently and systematically being dispossessed of —in the art world and in Brooklyn—and mirroring Mutu’s incorporation of various mediums, styles, and materials in her own work through the poem’s experimental sprawl. 

In the first section, Sanchez writes, “you are here. you are there. / you will never go away. / you kiss your own breath / sleepwalk your eyes / stretch out with mouths / singing your legs.” She asserts Mutu’s presence through language that centers embodiment in space and place. Some sections of the poem, in contrast, delve into what reads like a poetic description of Mutu’s art: “red orange breasts / leaking medical / hieroglyphics / bones for sale / immaculate bones for sale,” conducting in real time the process of forging a relationship between art and viewer. Sometimes Sanchez poses questions to the figures she gazes at, such as “now that you sigh amid / the pale gaze of thirst, / is that God’s tongue / sliding down your throat?” Sometimes she meets the art with instant recognition, as in, “i know, i know it, i know / smell the jelly roll woman / squatting in her skin / her bright face eating bluesorrow / smell the doctoral urgency / of her shudderings / female pain profiling / her hunger.” In the poem’s sixth and closing section, Sanchez returns to addressing “Sister Wangechi,” creating an intricate life-world similar to Mutu’s own projects through the poem’s sonic aliveness, declarative power, and address to Mutu herself. With the last lines “i invoke your name, your / gallery of female matadors / as they come and dance in thunder...(click!),” Sanchez ends with an image—“gallery of female matadors”—that shows how Mutu’s work and creations offer another protected world, an alternative landscape, for those who encounter them.