Robert Hayden

Steel doors – guillotine gates – of the doorless house closed massively
We were locked in with loss
Guards frisked us, marked our wrists,then let us into the drab Rec Hall –splotched green walls, high windows barred –where the dispossess...

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all, when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole, reflex action; when it is f...

Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darknessand the darkness thicketed with shapes of terrorand the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuingand the night cold and the night long and the riverto cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning...

I He dines alone surrounded by reflections of himself
Then after sleep and benzedrine descends the Cinquecento stair his magic wrought from hypochondria of the well- to-do and nagging deathwish of the poor; swirls on smiling genuflections of ...

The old woman across the way is whipping the boy againand shouting to the neighborhood her goodness and his wrongs
Wildly he crashes through elephant ears, pleads in dusty zinnias,while she in spite of crippling fat pursues and corners him

Then fled,
O brethren, the wicked juba and wandered wandered far from curfew joys in the Dismal’s night
Fool of St
Elmo’s fire In scary night I wandered, praying, Lord God my harshener, speak to me now or let me die; speak,...

For Maia and Julie)                        Drifting night in the Georgia pines,                        coonskin drum and jubilee banjo
Pretty Malinda, dance with me
Night is juba, night is congo
Pretty Malinda, dance with me

(And I,
I am no longer of that world)Naked, he lies in the blinded roomchainsmoking, cradled by drugs, by jazzas never by any lover's cradling flesh
Miles Davis coolly blows for him:
O pena negra, sensual Flamenco blues;the red clay...

Today as the news from Selma and Saigonpoisons the air like fallout,
I come again to seethe serene, great picture that I love
Here space and time exist in lightthe eye like the eye of faith believes
The seen, the knowndissolve in ir...

Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing and the night cold and the night long and the river to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns becko...

Lord’s lost Him His mockingbird,       His fancy warbler;       Satan sweet-talked her,       four bullets hushed her
Who would have thought       she’d end that way
Four bullets hushed her
And the world a-clang with evil