Yusef Salaam Quotes

I said that love heals from inside. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

Title: Blue Light Lounge Sutra For The Performance Poets At Harold Park Hotel

the need gotta be
so deep words can't
answer simple questions
all night long notes
stumble off the tongue
& color the air indigo
so deep fragments of gut
& flesh cling to the song
you gotta get into it
so deep salt crystalizes on eyelashes
the need gotta be
so deep you can vomit up ghosts
& not feel broken
till you are no more
than a half ounce of gold
in painful brightness
you gotta get into it
blow that saxophone
so deep all the sex & dope in this world
can't erase your need
to howl against the sky
the need gotta be
so deep you can't
just wiggle your hips
& rise up out of it
chaos in the cosmos
modern man in the pepperpot
you gotta get hooked
into every hungry groove
so deep the bomb locked
in rust opens like a fist
into it into it so deep
rhythm is pre-memory
the need gotta be basic
animal need to see
& know the terror
we are made of honey
cause if you wanna dance
this boogie be ready
to let the devil use your head
for a drum ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

The place was a funeral pyre for the young
who died before knowing the thirst of man
or woman. Furies with snakes in their hair
wept. Tantalus ate pears & sipped wine
in a dream, as the eyes of a vulture
poised over Tityus' liver. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

We were born between Oh Yeah
& Goddammit. I knew life
Began where I stood in the dark,
Looking out into the light,
& that sometimes I could see
Everything through nothing.
The backyard trees breathed
Like a man running from himself
As my brothers backed away
From the screendoor. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

I see myself as the oldest griot tradition of speaking to truth out here. There's a dark side that people don't even know is there. ~ Malik Yusef

The Way the Cards Fall "

Why did you stay away
so long? I've buried another
husband, since I last saw you
holding to the horizon.
I hear where you now live
it snows year-round.
The pear & apple trees
have even missed you–
dead branches scattered
about like war. Come closer,
my eyes have grown night-dim.
Across the field white boxes
of honeybees silent as dirt,
silent as your missent
postcards. Evening
sunlight's faded my hair,
the old stable's slouched
to the ground. I dug a hole
for that calico, Cyclops,
two years ago. Now
milkweed & blackberries
are keepers of the cornfield.
That's how the cards fall;
& Anna, that beautiful girl
you once loved enough
to die over & over again for,
now lives in New Orleans
on both sides
of Bourbon Street. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

Going from Army base to base as a kid taught me to be a man of all nations. I'd go to the Jewish people and say, 'Shalom, brother.' I go to the Muslim people and say, 'Salaam aleikum.'I go to the Chinese people and say, 'Nee hao mah,' which means, 'How you doin'?' I go to the Japanese people and say, 'Konnichiwa.' I go to San Antonio, Texas, and I get along with Mexicans. Then I go to Louisiana and hang with the Creoles. Moving around a lot made me a man of all people. ~ Shaquille O'Neal

Finally a soldier marched in and, holding his right hand to his chest, said, "Salaam aleikum. Chetor hastid? Jan-e-shoma jur ast? Khub hastid? Sahat-e-shoma khub ast? Be khair hastid? Jur hastid? Khane kheirat ast? Zinde bashi."
Which in Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian, means, "Peace be with you. How are you? Is your soul healthy? Are you well? Are you well? Are you healthy? Are you fine? Is your household flourishing? Long life to you." Or: "Hello. ~ Rory Stewart

No more wars, no more bloodshed. Peace unto you. Shalom, salaam, forever. ~ Menachem Begin

I glimpsed Alice in Wonderland.
Her voice smelled like an orange,
though I'd never peeled an orange.
I knocked on the walls, in a circle. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

It's all economic. Soda is easier to sell than orange juice because its costs less. Water, some coloring, some fizz, and this can, and we can sell this to you over and over and over again. And that's what rap is. ~ Malik Yusef

I've been here before, dreaming myself
backwards, among grappling hooks of light.
True to the seasons, I've lived every word
spoken. Did I walk into someone's nightmare? ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

Grub and Derek sitting on the veranda of the house in Dar es Salaam. Derek was a nationalized Tanzanian. He knew Swahili as well as he knew English. And he was liked and respected by almost all Tanzanians, including the Kigoma officials and my own field staff. He helped me to build up a new research center, where almost all the observations were made by the Tanzanian field staff. The ~ Jane Goodall

My doors enter from the sidestreet,
my windows painted basement black,
my mouth kisses the blues harp,
my heart hides like notes
locked in a cedar chest. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

The Quaker loves an ample brim, A hat that bows to no salaam; And dear the beaver is to him As if it never made a dam. ~ Thomas Hood

It doesn't matter if someone calls you a bad bitch, boss bitch, gangsta bitch, whatever, you're still being called a bitch and if you like it then they are right. You are a bitch. A dumb one at that. Yeah, I said it. ~ Sa'id Salaam

Putting my hands on.
What April couldn't fix
Wasn't worth the time:
Egg shell & dried placenta
Light as memory.
Patches of fur, feathers,
& bits of skin. A nest
Of small deaths among anemone.
A canopy edged over, shadowplaying
The struggle underneath
As if it never happened ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

The presidency is not an office job. If I only sit in the office in Dar es Salaam, I'm not running the country. I visit the country to inspect development programmes, to inspect activities, to see how things are going, how the government agenda is being implemented, what are the teething issues. ~ Jakaya Kikwete

I'm turning you into a girl
chasing a butterfly, a she-wolf
on a hilltop, & then back into a woman. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

When the soul looks out of its body, it should see only beauty in its path. These are the sights we must hold in mind, in order to move to a higher place. ~ Yusef Lateef

The stories circulating that Kanye West's laptop has been stolen are completely false. His laptop has never been out of his possession. Hence, the laptop has not been hacked, and there has been no leak of personal data such as unreleased music, photographs, designs, videos or any other personal files. The leak today of the unreleased track 'Awesome' was unrelated and completely coincidental. ~ Malik Yusef

Loveless moments are to be avoided. ~ Yusef Lateef

Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

I've broken it down to three basic types of people in gangs. You have the first type, the most dangerous, which are the glory seekers. They just want to be popular, they want to be stars, and they can do that in gangbanging. Then you have the one that I think is the worst, which is the one that's expected to be in the gang. Then you have the ones that were like me; they had to be. ~ Malik Yusef

Harriet turned round, and we both saw a girl walking towards us. She was dark-skinned and thin, not veiled but dressed in a sitara, a brightly coloured robe of greens and pinks, and she wore a headscarf of a deep rose colour. In that barren place the vividness of her dress was all the more striking. On her head she balanced a pitcher and in her hand she carried something. As we watched her approach, I saw that she had come from a small house, not much more than a cave, which had been built into the side of the mountain wall that formed the far boundary of the gravel plateau we were standing on. I now saw that the side of the mountain had been terraced in places and that there were a few rows of crops growing on the terraces. Small black and brown goats stepped up and down amongst the rocks with acrobatic grace, chewing the tops of the thorn bushes.
As the girl approached she gave a shy smile and said, 'Salaam alaikum, ' and we replied, 'Wa alaikum as salaam, ' as the sheikh had taught us. She took the pitcher from where it was balanced on her head, kneeled on the ground, and gestured to us to sit. She poured water from the pitcher into two small tin cups, and handed them to us. Then she reached into her robe and drew out a flat package of greaseproof paper from which she withdrew a thin, round piece of bread, almost like a large flat biscuit. She broke off two pieces, and handed one to each of us, and gestured to us to eat and drink. The water and the bread were both del ~ Paul Torday

I stared at a tree against dusk
Till it was a girl
Standing beside a country road
Shucking cane with her teeth.
She looked up & smiled
& waved. Lost in what hurts,
In what tasted good, could she
Ever learn there's no love
In sugar? ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

If we invest in logistic centers, improve on infrastructure and create a facilitative environment, we can easily turn Dar es Salaam into another Dubai of its kind. ~ Jakaya Kikwete

I define poetry as celebration and confrontation. When we witness something, are we responsible for what we witness? That's an on-going existential question. Perhaps we are and perhaps there's a kind of daring, a kind of necessary energetic questioning. Because often I say it's not what we know, it's what we can risk discovering. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

The normal kid can differentiate between various aspects of life, but a kid with dyslexia has to connect all those dots, and they have to link it like a chain. Teachers can't incorporate that. They don't have time; it's not their fault. They don't have the resources to give personal attention to each kid in the classroom. ~ Malik Yusef

I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there's an ongoing evolution of clarity. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

You can two-time satan
But you can't lick the Holy Ghost. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

Decisions made in Washington are more important to us than those made here in Dar es-Salaam. So, maybe my people should be allowed to vote in American presidential elections. ~ Julius Nyerere

You got to have dedicated people, a lot of dedicated folk. There's only so much one person can do. We really have to find people in our community that can give an hour a week. I was recruited because I started gangbanging at 12. I understand the structure; I understand the people inside. ~ Malik Yusef

It always came to this. A demand, a need to know that the tenderness in the air was reciprocal, Still, she would not speak. She preferred to focus on enjoying the tingly feelings. ~ Kiini Ibura Salaam

I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa