We were catching up on family
And arguing politics
I turned up our mountain
Just as I admonished her:
But The President hasn’t done anything
About jobs
When something said:
You are going too fast
It may have been the wine that evening
But I have to confess:
I speed a lot
So I heeded the voice
My eyes always sweep the Trail
Leading to my home
From Side to Side
There is always a cat
Or raccoon seldom a coyote and at this hour of
night the turtles
And snakes are in bed
My aunt asked: Why
Are you hitting your brakes
When a beautiful white strip
Surrounded by shiny black fur
With fear in her eyes
Got caught in my headlights
And stopped
I stopped too
And waited.
She continued her journey across the trail
And I hope
Home to her babies
We need to watch
One day it may be
Us
Author’s Note
The author gratefully acknowledges the following publications in which poems in Chasing Utopia first appeared, sometimes in slightly different form:
“Chasing Utopia”: Poetry Magazine
“Spices,” “The International Open,” and “It’s Just Love”: Appalachian Heritage
“Icarus”: Icarus: The Wyoming High School Magazine
“When God Made Mountains”: The Knoxville Journal
“These Women”: Tiferet Journal
“Poets”: Cultural Weekly
“In Defense of Flowers”: The Roanoke Times
“Exercise”: Cerise Press
“I Wish I Could Live (in a Book)”: What You Wish For: A Book for Darfur
“Don Pullen”: The Jefferson Center Tribute to Don Pullen
“When My Phone Trembles” and “The Scared and the Vulnerable”: Prairie Schooner
“Note to the South: You Lost,” previously published as “The Lost Cause Lost”: Lines in a Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration: Poems and Photographs, Past and Present
“Our Job Safety Is Your Priority with Coffee”: The Atlantic
About the Author
NIKKI GIOVANNI, poet, activist, mother, and professor, is a seven-time NAACP Image Award winner and the first recipient of the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award, and holds the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry, among many other honors. The author of twenty-eight books and a Grammy nominee for The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection, she is the University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
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Also by Nikki Giovanni
POETRY
Black Feeling Black Talk / Black Judgement
Re: Creation
My House
The Women and the Men
Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day
Those Who Ride the Night Winds
The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni
Love Poems
Blues: For All the Changes
Acolytes
The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni
Bicycles
PROSE
Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet
A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni
A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker
Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles
Racism 101
EDITED BY NIKKI GIOVANNI
Night Comes Softly: An Anthology of Black Female Voices
Appalachian Elders: A Warm Hearth Sampler
Grand Mothers: Poems, Reminiscences, and Short Stories About the Keepers of Our Traditions
Grand Fathers: Reminiscences, Poems, Recipes, and Photos of the Keepers of Our Traditions
Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking at the Harlem Renaissance Through Poems
FOR CHILDREN
Spin a Soft Black Song
Vacation Time: Poems for Children
Knoxville, Tennessee
The Genie in the Jar
The Sun Is So Quiet
Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People
The Grasshopper’s Song: An Aesop’s Fable Revisited
Rosa
Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass: An American Friendship
Hip Hop Speaks to Children
Copyright
CHASING UTOPIA. Copyright © 2013 by Nikki Giovanni. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-688-15697-8
EPUB Edition OCTOBER 2013 ISBN 9780062308139
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