Robert Hayden
The Whipping
The old woman across the way is whipping the boy again And shouting to the neighborhood her goodness and his wrongs. Wildly he crashes through elephant ears, pleads in dusty zinnias, While she in
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early And put his clothes on in the blueback cold, Then with cracked hands that ached From labor in the weekday weather made Banked fires blaze. No one
Frederick Douglass
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful And terrible thing, needful to man as air, Usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all, When it is truly instinct,
O Daedalus, Fly Away Home
(For Maia and Julie) Drifting night in the Georgia pines, Coonskin drum and jubilee banjo. Pretty Malinda, dance with me. Night is juba, night is congo. Pretty Malinda, dance with me. Night is an
El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X)
O masks and metamorphoses of Ahab, Native Son I The icy evil that struck his father down And ravished his mother into madness Trapped him in violence of a punished self Struggling to break
Runagate Runagate
Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness And the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror And the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing And the night cold and the night long and
The Prisoners
Steel doors – guillotine gates – Of the doorless house closed massively. We were locked in with loss. Guards frisked us, marked our wrists, Then let us into the drab Rec Hall – Splotched
Full Moon
No longer throne of a goddess to whom we pray, No longer the bubble house of childhood’s Tumbling Mother Goose man, The emphatic moon ascends The brilliant challenger of rocket experts, The white hope
Monet's Waterlilies
Today as the news from Selma and Saigon Poisons the air like fallout, I come again to see The serene, great picture that I love. Here space and time exist in light The eye
Middle Passage
I Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy: Sails flashing to the wind like weapons, Sharks following the moans the fever and the dying; Horror the corposant and compass rose. Middle Passage: Voyage through death To life
Soledad
(And I, I am no longer of that world) Naked, he lies in the blinded room Chainsmoking, cradled by drugs, by jazz As never by any lover’s cradling flesh. Miles Davis coolly blows for
Perseus
Her sleeping head with its great gelid mass Of serpents torpidly astir Burned into the mirroring shield A scathing image dire As hated truth the mind accepts at last And festers on. I struck.