LETTER TO PHILLIS WHEATLEY WRITTEN
WHILE LOOKING AT HER
PORTRAIT ON THE BLACK HERITAGE
POSTAGE STAMP ISSUED
29 JANUARY 2026
...blooming
graces, triumph in my song.
...a faithful
tongue…
...imagination
is the empyreal palace of a trustin God
...Now here,
Now there, the roving Fancy flies,
till some lov’d
object strikes her wand’ring eyes,
Whose silken
fetters all the senses bind,
And soft
captivity involves the mind.
Imagination,
who can sing thy force?
…each noble
path pursue… Phillis Wheatley
Jupiter Hammon’s
letter addresses you
as elder, poet,
peer, Christian, and slave,
both of you freed,
and today we might add
immigrant—that,
like everything between us
seems stretched.
Hammon, born in 1711,
was 62 when your
book,
Poems on Various
Subjects
Religious and
Moral, is published, 1773--
Phillis, you’re 20
years old. Both of you
wrote poems. You
crossed at 31,
Hammon dies at 95.
Starting with his letter,
he calls you pious
youth in the first
stanza; and in the
second one, he says
you might have been
left behind.
You were 8 when you
arrived
on the slave ship
Phillis
receiving your new
name.
Black writers, black
women who insist
in living in ink,
your fellow poet June Jordan
writes, have been
writing about you
Still, may the
painter’s and the poet’s fire,
to aid thy
pencil and thy verse conspire?
There in one
view we grasp the mighty whole...
...twice six
gates on radiant hinges ring
celestial
blooms in endless spring
And may the
muse inspire each future song!
...these shades
of time are chased away…
For nobler
themes demand a nobler strain,
And purer
language…
for 250 years. You
open 250 Years
of Struggle and
Song, Kevin Young’s
Library of Congress
monument to
African American
Poetry, while
Jupiter Hammon’s
letter to you
follows your poems.
You, then and now,
are the Mother of
African American
literature and I
address you as such.
Hammon knows your
poems
when he writes,
...adore
the wisdom of
your God.
Adore, because you
might
have been left
behind. He believes
America is a good
place to be,
making Christianity
possible. In Stanza 4
he says it stronger:
God’s tender mercy
Inflame the
heart, and captivate the mind…
How he has
wrestled with his God by night
To shield your
poet from the burning day:
Calliope, awake
the sacred lyre,
While thy fair
sisters fan the pleasing fire.
And through the
air their mingled music floats.
Spirits dart
through flowing veins
...Fancy
dresses to delight the Muse…
...frozen deeps
may break iron bands...
brought you here,
and it’s worth
all the gold in
Spain. Hammon
is a bit
overbearing—I’m an old man
at 80, and know that
voice, he may be
jealous, too, he
wrote sermons
all his life, he
urges, Dear Phillis,
seek heaven’s
joys. Neither of you
can see the mess
we’re in now.
Michael Harper’s
anthology’s here, too.
African American
Poetry, 200 Years
of Vision, struggle,
Power, Beauty and Triumph--
you and Jupiter
Hammon, presented
at the beginning,
and Harper gives us
your other visions:
To the painter,
to the Morning, and
Evening, and death,
on leaving for
England.
You’re at the
beginning of it all.
I’m looking at
your stamp.
Black and white, ink
on paper.
25 Million postage
stamps of you.
I write as one who
has been lifted,
if not saved, by
black poets. I sit,
struck by your poems
traveling
through time. There’s paper, and
Phillis, you’re
holding a pencil,
where you’ve
written,
Preface to my
Second Volume.
Jupiter
Hammon’s here too.
Following
always, Jim
P.
S. We’re here in the living
room, together.
All of us. Here,
in the all of it.
Jim
Bodeen
29
January 2026
Phillis, we’re
here in the living room, together.
All of us. We’re
here, in the all of it.
Jim
Bodeen
29
January 2026
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