Jean Toomer

Boll-weevil's coming, and the winter's cold,
Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,
And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,
Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,

To those fixed on white,
White is white,
To those fixed on black,
It is the same,

Full moon rising on the waters of my heart,
Lakes and moon and fires,
Cloine tires,
Holding her lips apart

A certain man wishes to be a
Of this earth; he also wants to beA saint and master of the being-world
Conscience cannot exist in the first:
The second cannot exist without conscience

Black reapers with the sound of steel on
Are sharpening scythes
I see them place the
In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done,

There is no transcience of twilight in The beauty of your soft dusk-dimpled face, No flicker of a slender flame in space,
In crucibles, fragility crystalline
There is no fragrance of the jessamine About you, no pathos of some old place A...

Pour O pour that parting soul in songO pour it in the sawdust glow of
Into the velvet pine-smoke air tonight,
And let the valley carry it along
And let the valley carry it along