
Jean Toomer
Her Lips Are Copper Wire
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...
The Lost Dancer
Spatial depths of being
The birth to death
Of feet dancing on earth of sand;
Vibrations of the dance
Reapers
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
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
Unsuspecting
There is a natty kind of
That slicks its thoughts,
Culls its oughts,
Trims its views,
A Certain Man
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
Harvest Song
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
People
To those fixed on white,
White is white,
To those fixed on black,
It is the same,
For MW
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...
November Cotton Flower
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,
Evening Song
Full moon rising on the waters of my heart,
Lakes and moon and fires,
Cloine tires,
Holding her lips apart
Song of the Son
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