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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