Jean Toomer

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,

Tell me, dear beauty of the dusk,
When purple ribbons bind the hill,
Do dreams your secret wish fulfill,
Do prayers, like kernels from the

I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown
All my oats are cradled
But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them
And I hunger

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

Spatial depths of being
The birth to death
Of feet dancing on earth of sand;
Vibrations of the dance

The sky, lazily disdaining to
The setting sun, too indolent to holdA lengthened tournament for flashing gold,
Passively darkens for night's barbeque,
A feast of moon and men and barking hounds

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

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

whisper of yellow globesgleaming on lamp-posts that swaylike bootleg licker drinkers in the fogand let your breath be moist against melike bright beads on yellow globestelephone the power-housethat the main wires are insulate(her words play softly...

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

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...

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,