Sun Goddess

    David Henderson's Son Goddess describes a thin, tall, strong, African-American woman from the South. She seems to have been through a lot. She was raised picking cotton in the fields. She speaks of a husband who may have passed away. She is reminiscing on how it use to be laying next to him, and how she misses his touch, and friendly pats on the behind. She is a single mother of two living in a flat. You rarely hear the term flat meaning apartment. But as I looked into it a flat is a single level family home that can be rented out or owned, whereas an apartment you have to go into a building that has several floors, and many apartments on each floor.
    As she looks out her kitchen window  she can see a tenement building, which is a building that occupies three or more families, usually in a poor section of a large city. She may have once lived in a tenement building as she says "It seems where you were raised follows you. She had to chuckle at the conscious thought of her little backyard in a city full of tenements." (58) So although she still lives in a large city, and poor neighborhood a lot has changed for her as far as her living environment.
    This poem seems to tell more of a story and has a plot to it, similar to the poem "Good Joanna", although it has a mixture of telling a story and having a free verse poem all in one, while the others are more free verse. This style of poetry is a prose, it has no metrical structure. It applies a natural flow of speech, and ordinary grammatical structure rather than rhythmic structure. Henderson is telling a story, it could be his own personal story about his mother and the hard life she had as a single mother of two. The title "Sun Goddess" means she is worshiped  and has power and strength, and in his eyes as a little boy that's what his mother was to him, a powerful black woman.