Mahogany Whispers: Poetry for the soul

Caribbean Poet Eve Miriam wrote a well known verse called “How to eat a poem” and she says QUOTE “Don’t be polite.  Bite in.  Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that may run down your chin.  It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.” END QUOTE. So if you are hungry for words in addition to the sun that comes with an Easter weekend, then the verses of Rita Mae Hyde, should fill your belly.  Hyde, a lecturer at UB, has released her poetry compilation called “Mahogany Whispers.”

Ritamae Hyde, Poet

“Mahogany Whispers, poetry for me has always been a part of my life. I started writing poems, I always tell people, before I even knew what poetry was. On little pieces of papers, I would watch a movie and I would have these little emotions at the end. I would write a poem. I would go out on the street. I would go notice and observe different things happening and I would write a poem. So before I knew the form, I knew I was writing what I saw and felt.  I was doing that from when I was nine years old. The perfect poem is volatile, A weapon of mass disruption, against corruption; alienation and racial acrimony. Serving as a discriminatory agent, the perfect poem acts against all oppressors including the great one eyed leaders of this world.  The perfect poem is reborn. It is the audacity of hope, the once alien dreams of a Martin Luther King Junior realized in a Barrack Obama. The perfect poem has assumed a voice.

My books invokes heritage, it invokes culture, experiences of a people, of a country. So it’s not only my whispers as I see it and my experiences as I feel it but also those of your experiences, those of others, people  in a society, all cultures , all backgrounds .

Mahogany Whispers costs twenty five dollars and can be found at Brodies, the Angelus Press and the Image Factory Books Store.