Nothing Gold Can Stay”

By Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold, 

Her hardest hue to hold. 
Her early leaf's a flower; 
But only so an hour. 
Then leaf subsides to leaf. 
So Eden sank to grief, 
So dawn goes down to day. 
Nothing gold can stay.
SHALL I COMPARE THEE TO
A SUMMER’S DAY?

ByWilliam Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Equality
By Maya Angelou
You declare you see me dimly
You announce my ways are
through a glass which will not wanton,
shine,
that I fly from man to man,
though I stand before you
but if I'm just a shadow to you,
boldly,
could you ever understand ?
trim in rank and marking time.
We have lived a painful history,
You do own to hear me faintly
we know the shameful past,
as a whisper out of range,
but I keep on marching
while my drums beat out the
forward,
message
and you keep on coming last.
and the rhythms never change.
Equality, and I will be free.
Equality, and I will be free.
Equality, and I will be free.
Equality, and I will be free.
Take the blinders from your vision,
take the padding from your ears,
and confess you've heard me crying,
and admit you've seen my tears.
Hear the tempo so compelling,
hear the blood throb in my veins.
Yes, my drums are beating nightly,
and the rhythms never change.
Equality, and I will be free.

Equality, and I will be free_x0000_

"We Wear the Mask”
By
Paul Laurence Dunbar
We Wear the Mask
    WE wear the mask that
grins and lies,
    It hides our cheeks and
shades our eyes,—
    This debt we pay to
human guile;
    With torn and bleeding
hearts we smile,
    And mouth with myriad
subtleties.
    Why should the world be
over-wise,
    In counting all our tears
and sighs?
  Nay, let them only see us,
while
            We wear the mask.
    We smile, but, O great
Christ, our cries
    To thee from tortured
souls arise.
    We sing, but oh the clay
is vile
    Beneath our feet, and
long the mile;
    But let the world dream
otherwise,
            We wear the mask!
"Song of Myself”
By Walt Whitman
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs
to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of
summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my , form'd from this
soil,
     this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents
the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health