A Warm Welcome
Here it comes again
The long-missed month of June
As it did last year
And the year before
Holding the year
By its tender waist
A full fateful half
That is sometimes fuller than the whole
The cornfields are green
With their tasseled triumphs
Pumpkins roll and rock
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In the theatre of the furrows
February’s famished rivers
Are back with billowing bounty
The mountain’s millennial wrinkles
Have vanished with the gleeful showers
The rains are back
But alas, not our fortune
In this grim land and its drought of dreams
And the long, long distance between
The morsel and the mouth
The Have-alls laugh with their banker friends
The Have—nots drown in the flood of want
Yeah, we jazz June* in different ways
•From the poem ‘We Real Cool, by Gwendolyn Brooks