Lorenzo Thomas

Lorenzo Thomas Poems

Lorenzo Thomas Biography

Lorenzo Thomas (August 31, 1944 – July 4, 2005) was an American poet and critic. He was born in the Republic of Panama and grew up in New York City, where his family immigrated in 1948. Thomas was a graduate of Queens College in New York. During his years there, he joined the Umbra Workshop, which drew young writers to the Lower East Side of New York City in search of their artistic voices. It served as a crucible for emerging black poets, among them Ishmael Reed, David Henderson and Calvin C. Hernton. The workshop was one of the currents that fed the Black Arts Movement of the '60s and '70s, the first major African-American artistic movement after the Harlem Renaissance. For more than two decades a professor of English at the University of Houston–Downtown, Thomas also made important contributions to the study of African-American literature. In 2000, he published Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry, his overview of the work of James Fenton and Amiri Baraka, among others.)

The Best Poem Of Lorenzo Thomas

Back In The Day

When we were boys
We called each other 'Man'
With a long n
Pronounced as if a promise

We wore felt hats
That took a month to buy
In small installments
Shiny Florsheim or Stacy Adams shoes
Carried our dancing gait
And flashed our challenge

Breathing our aspirations into words
We harmonized our yearnings to the night
And when old folks on porches dared complain
We cussed them out
under our breaths
And walked away
And once a block away
Held learned speculations
About the character of their relations
With their mothers
It's true
That every now and then
We killed each other
Borrowed a stranger's car
Burned down a house
But most boys went to jail
For knocking up a girl
He really truly deeply loved
really truly deeply

But was too young
Too stupid, poor, or scared
To marry

Since then I've learned
Some things don't never change:
The breakfast chatter of the newly met
Our disappointment
With the world as given

Today,
News and amusements
Filled with automatic fire
Misspelled alarms
Sullen posturings and bellowed anthems
Our scholars say
Young people doubt tomorrow

This afternoon I watched
A group of young men
Or tall boys
Handsome and shining with the strength of futures
Africa's stubborn present
To a declining white man's land
Lamenting
As boys always did and do
Time be moving on
Some things don't never change
And how
back in the day
Well
things were somehow better
They laughed and jived
Slapped hands
And called each other 'Dog'

Lorenzo Thomas Comments