1. Discovering Your Destiny

2. Langston Hughes I, too, sing America I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong.
Tomorrow, I'll sit at the table When company comes. Nobody'll dare Say to me, "Eat in the kitchen," Then.
Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed,--
I, too, am America.
I, too, sing America

3. Margaret Walker Dark Blood
There were bizarre beginnings in old lands for the making         of me. There were sugar sands and islands of fern and         pearl, palm jungles and stretches of a never-ending sea. There were the wooing nights of tropical lands and the cool         discretion of flowering plains between two stalwart         hills. They nurtured my coming with wanderlust. I         sucked fevers of adventure through my veins with my         mother's milk. Someday I shall go to the tropical lands of my birth, to the         coasts of continents and the tiny wharves of island         shores. I shall roam the Balkans and the hot lanes of         Africa and Asia. I shall stand on mountain tops and         gaze on fertile homes below. And when I return to Mobile I shall go by the way of         Panama and Bocas del Toro to the littered streets and         the one-room shacks of my old poverty, and blazing suns         of other lands may struggle then to reconcile the pride         and pain in me.
Margaret Walker
Dark Blood

4. Seamus Heaney Personal Helicon
As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. I savoured the rich crash when a bucket Plummeted down at the end of a rope. So deep you saw no reflection in it. A shallow one under a dry stone ditch Fructified like any aquarium. When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch A white face hovered over the bottom. Others had echoes, gave back your own call With a clean new music in it. And one Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection. Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Personal Helicon