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The Sun Came

By Etheridge Knight 1931–1991 Etheridge Knight

                                                        And if sun comes
                                                        How shall we greet him?
                                                                    —Gwen Brooks

The sun came, Miss Brooks,—

After all the night years.

He came spitting fire from his lips.

And we flipped—We goofed the whole thing.

It looks like our ears were not equipped

For the fierce hammering.

And now the Sun has gone, has bled red,

Weeping behind the hills.

Again the night shadows form.

But beneath the placid face a storm rages.

The rays of Red have pierced the deep, have struck

The core. We cannot sleep.

The shadows sing: Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm.

The darkness ain't like before.

The Sun came, Miss Brooks.

And we goofed the whole thing.

I think.

(Though ain't no vision visited my cell.)

Etheridge Knight, "The Sun Came" from The Essential Etheridge Knight. Copyright © 1986 by Etheridge Knight. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: The Essential Etheridge Knight (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986)

Biography

Etheridge Knight began writing poetry while an inmate at the Indiana State Prison and published his first collection, Poems from Prison in 1968. "His work was hailed by black writers and critics as another excellent example of the powerful truth of blackness in art," writes Shirley Lumpkin in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. "His work became important in Afro-American poetry and poetics and in the strain of Anglo-American . . .

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