Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

I wanna go home
As the dusk rises
With the sun bending down
And thus, staying there
Until it begins to rise again.

In your car
With the windows down
Does light shine dim
And bright shading the
galaxy, the sky.

Racing down the street
Goes the gas smell and
the steam of engine
rolling and curling, identified
by the neighborhood stoop
kids.

We gather,
We gather.

Our baggage is familiar
The song doesn’t free us
It simply rotates in our
Head.
& on & on
with recognition in our
Eye.

We stare ahead at our
Futures down the road
Away from the homes
Our guts have ever known.

It is dusk quieting us down.
We’re silent now.
No singing
Just dreaming staring
At the center.
The core
Like the hot inside of
The Earth.

We burn
Like a towering inferno
Settling into the far
Distance.

Genre : Futures, Youth, Romance, Fear, Moving Forward

Get to know the poet:

1) What is the theme of your poem?

The theme of this poem is youth and future and combining that to become more of a melancholy look into that idea of youth and the future fading away. Not only that, it's seeing that youth has kept them away from seeing the truth of things and these truths are evident in the poem. It's also about fear of the future but eventually having to move on from this fear and go through it.

2) What motivated you to write this poem?

What motivated me was how I am looking forward to the future and maybe how other people look towards it too. The future is vast and sometimes I have this fear of the future that grates on me. I was also looking at the idea of youth and the climate of the culture of today and what we have inherited as the youth of this time.

3) How long have you been writing poetry?

I have been writing poetry since I was 14 and I was in high school at the time. Langston Hughes inspired me but I wasn't always someone who liked writing.

4) If you could have dinner with one person (dead or alive), who would
that be?

This is a hard one but I think it is someone who has also influenced me tremendously and that is Zora Neale Hurston, who was an anthropologist but also one of the writers featured within the Harlem Renaissance and that is an era full of artists, writers, musicians I would love to meet. Ms Hurston seemed to be an interesting woman based on what she knew as both an anthropologist and writer.

5) What influenced you to submit to have your poetry performed by a
professional actor?

I thought it would get more traction but also that my voice as of right now isn't the best at vocalizing what I want to say sometimes and this was the way to go as of now.

6) Do you write other works? scripts? Short Stories? Etc..?

I do indeed write short stories and I want to eventually go on to create novels. It's hard to sit down and focus on short stories sometimes because I have multiple WIP's (work in progress) and because my attention span is like that of a goldfish.

7) What is your passion in life?

My passion in life is to influence the world in a more positive way. That means helping the children in my family and having them also read literature but to help the cycle of trauma to stop. That means to put out works that inspire others to be and do more positive things and change the world by using kindness, empathy and being gentle towards those around them. That means having black women and girls see themselves as a main character they can relate to and be heard by and hopefully influence them to become a writer and write about their feelings and experiences.