n my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

An’ Slim Say, “Peter, I really cain’t tell, The place was Dixie That I took for hell.”

Git on back to de yearth, Cause I got de fear, You’se a leetle too dumb, Fo’ to stay up here. . .”

You sang: Keep a-inchin’ along Lak a po’ inch worm. . . . You sang: Bye and bye I’m gonna lay down dis heaby load . . . You sang: Walk togedder, chillen, Dontcha git weary. . . . The strong men keep a-comin’ on The strong men git stronger.

They dragged you from homeland, They chained you in coffles, They huddled you spoon-fashion in filthy hatches, They sold you to give a few gentlemen ease. They broke you in like oxen, They scourged you, They branded you, They made your women breeders, They swelled your numbers with bastards. . . . They taught you the religion they disgraced.

Dey comes to hear Ma Rainey from de little river settlements, From blackbottorn cornrows and from lumber camps; Dey stumble in de hall, jes a-laughin’ an’ a-cacklin’, Cheerin’ lak roarin’ water, lak wind in river swamps.

When Ma Rainey Comes to town, Folks from anyplace Miles aroun’, From Cape Girardeau, Poplar Bluff, Flocks in to hear Ma do her stuff; Comes flivverin’ in, Or ridin’ mules, Or packed in trains, Picknickin’ fools. . . . That’s what it’s like, Fo’ miles on down, To New Orleans delta An’ Mobile town, When Ma hits Anywheres aroun’.

I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.

Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there,

I shall return, I shall return again, To ease my mind of long, long years of pain.

I SHALL return again; I shall return

In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall Its veil.

Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace, Has pushed the timid little feet of clay, The sacred brown feet of my fallen race! Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet In Harlem wandering from street to street.

Or does it explode?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway . . . He did a lazy sway . . . To the tune o’ those Weary Blues. With his ebony hands on each ivory key He made that poor piano moan with melody. O Blues! Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet Blues! Coming from a black man’s soul. O Blues! In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone

Eat in the kitchen,” Then.

I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong.

I bathe in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans,* and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

, namely the fact that the more intelligent and representative elements of the two race groups have at so many points got quite out of vital touch with one another. The fiction is that the life of the races is separate and increasingly so. The fact is that they have touched too closely at the unfavorable and too lightly at the favorable levels.

So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being –a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be “kept down,” or “in his place,” or “helped up,” to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.

the New Negro but they are at a loss to account for him. He simply cannot be swathed in their formulae. For the younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the masses, and under the very eyes of the professional observers is transforming what has been a perennial problem into the progressive phases of contemporary Negro life.

New Negro

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.

The old subconscious “white is best”

low-down folks

But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America–this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

Paper come out Strewed de news (repeat) Seben po’ niggers Moanin’ death house blues  

1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1; bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at

not afraid, leaping, rising – – hit him again, he cut my pay check Dempsey. My God, Dempsey’s down – – he cut my pay check – – Dempsey’s down, down, the bastards are killing Dempsey.

This May has deeper meaning now than ever.   Close your ranks, touch shoulders – – ready? There’s our signal – – March!

delve backward through the years’ accumulated dust: Haymarket – – Spies, George Engel, Albert Parsons – – the noose drawn tightly – – gasping “I have nothing, nothing, not even now, that I regret. . . “ Fisher and Lingg, their shadows cast by a setting sun westward to California, east to Hatteras where embattled workers sought an added hour of day.   Mark their names well: their death   and now recall the spring that came the next year and the years that followed and the wars that bled us and the war that bore shining through the mud and mangled limbs the dawn, life for the men of Russia and for us

Down countless avenues the senses feel impending change: the clues that guide our burdened hearts, heavy with pain, awakening class-memories – –   they burn again!

Not Christmas nor the new year white with snow and cold with dying names emasculate marks for our lives the new year. Only spring arrived at its fulfillment, at the peak or verdurous blossoming connotes the quick deep breath of hope again – – the sharp release of man grown tense with winter, now set free

And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

You see he does not believe I am sick

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,

Of Our Spiritual Strivings

No more relation could he discover between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and the cathedral.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts

They feed they Lion and he comes.

Lion

Love Is Not All

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;

I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick, I made the garden, and for holiday Rambled over the fields where sang the larks, And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,

ife is too strong for you– It takes life to love Life.

Spoon River,

Seth

Blind to all of it all my life long.

Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth, Courage, constancy, heroism, failure–

Petit

Eben

For auld lang syne

Mr. Flood,

Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,

A phantom salutation of the dead

He raised up to the light The jug that he had gone so far to fill, And answered huskily: “Well, Mr. Flood, Since you propose it, I believe I will.

Flood’s

e

erk

the men were just as good, And just as human as they ever were.