The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

*****

Gwendolyn Brooks was one of the greatest 20th century American poets: stylistically creative, with haunting imagery and themes, emotionally engaging, socially engaged. She wrote formal verse, free verse and loosely structured ballads – sometimes all in the same sequence, as in The Womanhood.

Appropriately, ‘We Real Cool’ is her best-known poem: simple, poignant, striking at the heart of America’s structural inequality and moral failures, and presented on the page with a bizarre twist that is both unnecessary and essential: unnecessary because the three-word lines rhyme correctly without having ‘We’ at the end… essential because the reader is forced to emphasize the ‘We’, so that the last line seems (like the youths’ lives) unnaturally shortened, prematurely ended.

A simple poem. Maybe not her greatest, but iconic.

Photo: “Pool Players” by Johnny Silvercloud is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.