Claude McKay

ON thy purple mat thy body bare  Is fine and limber like a tender tree
The motion of thy supple form is rare,  Like a lithe panther lolling languidly,
Toying and turning slowly in her lair
Oh,

Oh,
I have tried to laugh the pain away,
Let new flames brush my love-springs like a feather
But the old fever seizes me to-day,

Last night I heard your voice, mother, The words you sang to me When I, a little barefoot boy, Knelt down against your knee
And tears gushed from my heart, mother, And passed beyond its wall, But though the fountain reached my throat The drop...

So much have I forgotten in ten years,
So much in ten brief years
I have
What time the purple apples come to juice,

I hear the halting footsteps of a lass In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall Its veil
I see the shapes of girls who pass To bend and barter at desire's call
Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet Go prowling through the night fro...

The Dawn
The Dawn
The crimson-tinted, comes Out of the low still skies, over the hills,
Manhattan's roofs and spires and cheerless domes

The perfume of your body dulls my sense
I want nor wine nor weed; your breath alone Suffices
In this moment rare and tense  I worship at your breast
The flower is blown,

Their shadow dims the sunshine of our day,
As they go lumbering across the sky,
Squawking in joy of feeling safe on high,
Beating their heavy wings of owlish gray

Oh when I think of my long-suffering race, For weary centuries despised, oppressed, Enslaved and lynched, denied a human place In the great life line of the Christian West; And in the Black Land disinherited, Robbed in the ancient country of its b...

Your lips are like a southern lily red, Wet with the soft rain-kisses of the night,
In which the brown bee buries deep its head, When still the dawn's a silver sea of light
Your lips betray the secret of your soul, The dark delicious ess...

O lonely heart so timid of approach, Like the shy tropic flower that shuts its lips To the faint touch of tender finger tips:
What is your word
What question would you broach
Your lustrous-warm eyes are too sadly kind To mask the me...

Through the pregnant universe rumbles life's terrific thunder, And Earth's bowels quake with terror; strange and terrible storms break,
Lightning-torches flame the heavens, kindling souls of men, thereunder: Africa
long ages sleeping,