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
And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,then with cracked hands that achedfrom labor in the weekday weather madebanked fires blaze
No one ever thanked him
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, bre...

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,...