Margaret Walker - For My People - Poem for Easter Sunday, Year C

The Englewood Review of Books curates a weekly series of classic and contemporary poems that resonate with the themes of the lectionary readings. Here is one of the poems for this coming Sunday (More poems for Easter Sunday, Year C can be found here)

For My People

Margaret Walker

to accompany the lectionary reading: Isaiah 65:17-25

SNIPPET:

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs

       repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues

       and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an

       unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an

       unseen power;

…

[ READ THE FULL POEM ]

Margaret Walker (1915-1998) was an American poet and writer. She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. Her notable works include For My People (1942) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and the novel Jubilee (1966), set in the South during the American Civil War.  (via Wikipedia).