Nikki Giovanni’s “Resignation”: A Poetic Testament to Love
2 min read
#PoeticThursday
Nikki Giovanni’s voice has always stood at the crossroads of passion, protest, and profound truth. This week, we spotlight her poem Resignation, a piece that transforms love into a declaration of permanence and resilience.
“I love you
because the Earth turns round the sun
because the North wind blows north
sometimes because I do not always know everything
but this I know…”
Giovanni doesn’t write love as an abstraction. She roots it in the natural order of things—cosmic, inevitable, and undeniable. Her language carries an intimacy that feels universal. To love is to align yourself with the forces that shape our world.
This grounding makes the poem timeless. Where others might portray love as fleeting or conditional, Giovanni presents it as fact. Her lines remind us that desire is not just a spark but a force that endures, even in the face of change.
“I love you
because the Earth turns round the sun
because the North wind blows north
sometimes because I do not always know everything
but this I know…”
Giovanni is often described as one of the strongest voices of the Black Arts Movement, but her work refuses to be contained in any one movement. She reminds us that love, like art, is both political and personal. It resists erasure. It demands presence.
For our first Poetic Thursday, Giovanni sets the perfect tone: poetry that is as much about living as it is about loving.
How do you describe love? What words, images, or rhythms capture its presence in your life? Share your lines with us in the comments or tag us on social. Selected submissions may appear in a future Poetic Thursday.
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inkmag.substack.com Giovanni takes the universal — the Earth’s rotation, the wind — and roots it in the deeply personal act of loving. That ability to move from cosmic to intimate in a single breath is one of her trademarks.
