Chasing Utopia

by Nikki Giovanni

  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

  For the scared and the vulnerable

  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

  Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems

  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

  13 14 15 16 17 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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