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…

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…

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…

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

Then fled,
O brethren, the wicked juba
and wandered wandered far from curfew joys in the Dismal’s night.
Fool of St.

For Maia and Julie)
Drifting night in the Georgia pines,
coonskin drum and jubilee banjo.
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;

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…

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…

Lord’s lost Him His mockingbird,
His fancy warbler;
Satan sweet-talked her,
four bullets hushed her.