The right to make my dreams come true
I ask, nay, I demand of life,
Nor shall fate’s deadly contraband
Impede my steps, nor countermand.
Too long my heart against the ground
Has beat the dusty years around,
And now, at length, I rise, I wake!
And stride into the morning-break!
Ope! ye everlasting doors, unto my soul’s demand,
I would go forward, fare beyond these dusty boulevards,
Faint lights and fair allure me all insistently
And I must stand within the halls resplendent, of my dreams.
Hear their viol-voices ringing
Down the corridor of years,
As they lift their twilight faces
Through a mist of falling tears!
All day the world’s mad mocking strife,
The venomed prick of probing knife,
The baleful, subtle leer of scorn
That rims the world from morn to morn,
While reptile-visions writhe and creep
Into the very arms of sleep
To quench the fitful burnished gleams:
A crucifixion in my dreams!
These fell miasmic rings of mist, with ghoulish menace bound,
Like noose-horizons tightening my little world around,
They still the soaring will to wing, to dance, to speed away,
And fling the soul insurgent back into its shell of clay:
Beneath incrusted silences, a seething Etna lies,
The fire of whose furnaces may sleep—but never dies!
This spirit-choking atmosphere
With deadly serpent-coil
Entwines my soaring-upwardness
And chains me to the soil,
Where’er I seek with eager stride
To gain yon gleaming height,
These noisesome fetters coil aloft
And snare my buoyant flight.
O, why these aspirations bold,
These rigours of desire,
That surge within so ceaselessly
Like living tongues of fire?
And why these glowing forms of hope
That scintillate and shine,
If naught of all that burnished dream
Can evermore be mine?
It cannot be, fate does not mock,
And man’s untoward decree
Shall not forever thus confine
My life’s entirety,
My every fibre fierce rebels
Against this servile role,
And all my being broods to break
This death-grip from my soul!
My heart is pregnant with a great despair
With much beholding of my people’s care,
’Mid blinded prejudice and nurtured wrong,
Exhaling wantonly the days along:
I mark Faith’s fragile craft of cheering light
Tossing imperiled on the sea of night,
And then, enanguished, comes my heart’s low cry,
“God, God! I crave to learn the reason why!”
Again, in spirit loftily I soar
With wingèd vision through earth’s outer door,
In such an hour, it is mine to see,
In frowning fortune smiling destiny!
Oh, black man, why do you northward roam, and leave all the farm lands bare?
Is your house not warm, tightly thatched from storm, and a larder replete your share?
And have you not schools, fit with books and tools the steps of your young to guide?
Then what do you seek, in the north cold and bleak, ’mid the whirl of its teeming tide?
I have toiled in your cornfields, and parched in the sun, I have bowed ’neath your load of care,
I have patiently garnered your bright golden grain, in season of storm and fair,
With a smile I have answered your glowering gloom, while my wounded heart quivering bled,
Trailing mute in your wake, as your rosy dawn breaks, while I curtain the mound of my dead.
Though my children are taught in the schools you have wrought, they are blind to the sheen of the sky,
For the brand of your hand, casts a pall o’er the land, that enshadows the gleam of the eye,
My sons, deftly sapped of the brawn-hood of man, self-rejected and impotent stand,
My daughters, unhaloed, unhonored, undone, feed the lust of a dominant land.
I would not remember, yet could not forget, how the hearts beating true to your own,
You’ve tortured, and wounded, and filtered their blood ’till a budding Hegira has blown.
Unstrange is the pathway to Calvary’s hill, which I wend in my dumb agony,
Up its perilous height, in the pale morning light, to dissever my own from the tree.
And so I’m away, where the sky-line of day sets the arch of its rainbow afar,
To the land of the north, where the symbol of worth sets the broad gates of combat ajar!
Swift melting into yesterday,
The tortured hordes of ebon-clay;
No more is heard the plaintive strain,
The rhythmic chaunting of their pain.
Their mounded bodies dimly rise
To fill the gulf of sacrifice,
And o’er their silent hearts below
The mantled millions softly go.
Some few remaining still abide,
Gnarled sentinels of time and tide,
Now mellowed by a chastened glow
Which lighter hearts will never know.
Winding into the silent way,
Spent with the travail of the day,
So royal in their humble might
These uncrowned Pilgrims of the Night!
One drop of midnight in the dawn of life’s pulsating stream
Marks her an alien from her kind, a shade amid its gleam;
Forevermore her step she bends insular, strange, apart—
And none can read the riddle of her wildly warring heart.
The stormy current of her blood beats like a mighty sea
Against the man-wrought iron bars of her captivity.
For refuge, succor, peace and rest, she seeks that humble fold
Whose every breath is kindliness, whose hearts are purest gold.
(To You—Everywhere! Dedicated)
They seem to smile as others smile, the masquerader’s art
Conceals them, while, in verity, they’re eating out their heart,
Betwixt the two contending stones of crass humanity
They lie, the fretted fabric of a dual dynasty.
A single drop, a sable strain debars them from their own—
The others—fold them furtively, but God! they are alone,
Blown by the fickle winds of fate far from the traveled mart
To die, when they have quite consumed the morsel of their heart.
When man shall lift his lowered eyes to meet the moon of truth,
Shall break the shallow shell of pride and wax in ways of ruth,
He cannot hate, for love shall reign untrammelled in the soul,
While peace shall spread a rainbow o’er the earth from pole to pole.
Nor shall I in sorrow repine,
But offer a paean of
