David Henderson: Sun Goddess

Sun Goddess written by David Henderson is a poem describing an African-American women, who happens to be staring out her kitchen. Henderson describes the women as a tall strong women. While reading the poem, it seems like she has been through a lot.As a child, she picked cotton.( Henderson 58) She recalls of her husband who has passed away, "how nice it was just to lay beside his warmth every night"(59). The lady Henderson is describing is also a mother of two kids and they live in what is called a flat. A flat is typically a single home, while an apartment is apart of a building that has plenty more apartment. Staring out of her flat room, she sees a tenement building. In history, we are told that tenement building have apartments with more than 1 family living in each apartment.

While reading the poem,  I have notice that it does not look like other poems which are written in stanzas, or follow normal poem structure. This is a poem that follows a story structure. This type of poem is known as a prose poem. A prose is like an everyday writing. It has paragraphs, sentences, and normal grammatical structure. We can conclude that this is a story of Henderson's own mother and the struggle she faced as a single mother with two kids. Hence. the meaning of the title "Sun Goddess" is that the mother of Henderson is worshiped, having the characteristics of power and strength. As a little boy to him, in his own very two eyes, his mother was indeed a power black women.