Nina Yolande’s Lament

*This post is part of our online roundtable on Shirley Graham Du Bois to recognize the anniversary of her passing in March 1977. The contributions in this forum center her intellectual and cultural production as an author, playwright, activist, Pan-Africanist, and Black radical. 

Shirley’s shadow blocked

the sunshine I should have sensed,

but I tasted first.

Our trees bore our fruit.

The children proved the best ones,

first one plucked away.

The second, like me,

failed to yield the juice you craved;

girl-children we stayed.

While, publicly, you

chastised time for limiting

gender blossomings,

privately, you stopped

gardens from overgrowing

in the home you watched

from afar, tended

by lectures spoken to all,

like fertilizer

killing bugs of hope,

expectations pulled like weeds,

before they all grow.

And I learned to know

single long stems stand alone,

away from gardens,

left to last so long,

till nourishment ceased to be,

and leaves fell like tears

dropping over years,

watching other planted buds

have their pollen sucked

and then plucked, like me

until the tree called Shirley

over-shadowed all.

*Organizers’ Note: Poet and literary scholar Sandra Staton-Taiwo’s work appears in this forum courtesy of Broadside Lotus Press and the author. It was first published in her volume Broad Sympathies in a Narrow World: The Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois, which received the 2018 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Rich with layers of meaning, Staton-Taiwo’s poem is a brilliant and complex exploration of Du Bois’s first wife Nina Gomer Du Bois (1871-1950), to whom W. E. B. was married for over 50 years and his second wife Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896-1977), whom he wed in 1951.