A Sunset of the City

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.

It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.

It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers in drying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.

It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes.
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.

I am cold in this cold house, this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.

Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.

Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.

Gwendolyn Brooks
(1917-2000)
Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917 and raised in Chicago. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including 'Children Coming Home'; 'Blacks'; 'To Disembark'; 'The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems'; 'Riot'; 'In the Mecca'; 'The Bean Eaters'; 'Annie Allen', for which she received the Pulitzer Prize; and 'A Street in Bronzeville'. She also wrote numerous other books including a novel, 'Maud Martha', and 'Report from Part One: An Autobiography', and edited 'Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology'. In 1968, she was named Poet Laureate for the State of Illinois, and from 1985-86, she was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

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