a song in the front yard

I've stayed in the front yard all of my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets tired of a rose.

I want to go in the backyard now
And maybe down the alley,
Where the charity children play.
I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.
They have some wonderful fun.
My mother sneers, but I say its fine
How they don't have to go in at a quarter to nine.
My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae
Will grow up to be a bad woman.
That George'll be taken to jail soon or late
(On account of last winter he sold our back gate.)

But I say it's fine. Honest, I do.
And I'd like to be a bad woman, too,
And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace
And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems (Harper Perennial Books, 1963)