THE YEARS BETWEEN

I have returned, but you will never find,
All the familiar things of me intact,
I am like a classic that a modern mind
Has cut and altered to improve the act.

Now many passions agitate my heart,
For storms have swept the currents of my blood:
The years between have done their cyclic part--
The stream's new course found after the flood.

This mood that seems to you so passing strange,
This that you wrongly call a cynic smile,
Is nothing but a sequence of sea-change--
I have been running round a little while.

Though you may think me tired-minded, blank,
With nought to show since when I wandered hence,
No outward token that I found and drank
Deep of the fountain of experience:

Yet I am richer now by many things,
Such treasures as I found along the way,
Those moments of my flight with golden wings,
Attached a moment to my feet of clay.

HOME SONG

Oh breezes blowing on the red hill-top
By tall fox-tails,
Where through dry twigs and leaves and grasses hop
The dull-brown quails!

Is there no magic floating in the air
To bring to me
A breath of you, when I am homesick here
Across the sea?

Oh black boys holding on the cricket ground
A penny race!
What other black boy frisking round and round,
Plays in my place?

When picnic days come with their yearly thrills
In warm December,
The boy in me romps with you in the hills--
Remember!

TROPICAL RAIN

At the sign of the crows
Poised in the height of the sky,
The weltering south wind blows
And the hail-winging rain is nigh.

Over Mochos' dark-greeny brow,
The white cloud turns soon to gray
And the grey turns dark-darker now -
Spreading black towards Run-a-way Bay.

Now it strikes the hot ground,
Breaking out in singular rills,
Hark! the rivers dark sound
In the hills, far away, in the hills.

DREAMS

They are not bountiful now as before
More often they are horrible nightmares,
So many have been murdered in the roar
And bloody terror of the marring years

Oh for the higher power, the inner light,
To see and hold a while a little one,
They torture me, flitting across my night,
I hear, I see, I touch them! They are gone!

Oh I have even drugged myself to dream
Of dear dead things, trembling with hope to capture
The sunlit ripples laughing on the stream
That bathed my boyhood days in foamy rapture.

NEGRO SPIRITUAL

They have taken thee out of the simple soil,
Where the warm sun made mellowy thy tones,
And voices plaintive from eternal toil,
Thy music spoke in liquid, lyric moans:
They have ravished thee from out the brooding wood,
Where scenting bloodhounds caught thy whispered note,
And birds and trees and flowers all understood
The sorrow sobbing from a choking throat:
And brought thee to this brazen gilded hall,
Of waxen figures garishly arrayed,
Like those paraded at a carnival,
For whom an alien spirit has essayed
To dress thee up in virtuoso wonders,
Drowning thy beauty in orchestral thunders.

TRIBUTE

Where once you worked and dwelt,
Perplexed by doubts and fears,
Unloved by those you felt
Should most love through the years,

Your monument remains-
Unreared of mortal hands,
Compensating your pains -
The legend of a land.

I clearly see you now -
Unshadowed of pain or ill,
Your calm benignant brow -
Lone but more lovely still

Beyond the life-long gloom
Of living you have won,
Above your nameless tomb,
A flame, a world, a sun.

LIKE A STRONG TREE

Like a strong tree that in the virgin earth
Sends far its roots through rock and loam and clay,
And proudly strives in vain or time of dearth,
When the day waves scare rainy sprites away;
Like a strong tree that reaches down, deep, deep,
For sunken water fluid underground,
Where the great-ringed unsightly blind worms creep,
And queer things of the nether world abound:
So would I live in rich imperial growth,
Touching the surface and the depth of things,
Instinctively responsive unto both,
Tasting the sweets of being and the stings,
Sensing the subtle spell of changing forms,
Like a strong tree against a thousand storms.

MY HOUSE

For this peculiar tint that paints my house
Peculiar in an alien atmosphere
Where other houses have the same pale hue,
I have a feeling always very rare
And romane-making in my ardent blood,
That channels through my body like a flood.

I know the dark delight of being strange,
The penalty of difference in the crowd,
The loneliness of wisdom among fools,
Yet never have I felt but very proud,
Though I have suffered agonies in hell,
Of living in my own peculiar cell.

There is an exaltation of man's life,
His inner life that he alone may feel,
The blended fires that heat his veins within,
Shaping his metals into lasting steel,
Are kindled flaming from the secret hearth
That the wise gods bequeathed to him at birth.

For each man's mind contains its unknown realm,
Walled in from other men, however near,
Who cannot reach it even in highest flights
Of comprehension or of vision clear;
That realm where one withdraws to contemplate
Infinity to his own finite state.

Thence he may sometimes catch a godlike glimpse
of mysteries that gloom beyond life's bar;
Thence he may hurl his little shaft at heaven,
And bring down accidentally a star,
And drink its foamy dust like sparkling wine
And echo accents of the laugh divine.

Then he may fall into a drunken sleep
And wake up in his own house painted blue,
Or white or green or red or brown or black--
His house, his own, whatever be the hue.
And things for him will not be what they seem
To other men since he has had his dream.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.

The pavements slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
A chafing savage, down the decent street,
Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.

Oh I must search for wisdom every hour,
Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,
And find it in the superhuman power
To hold me to the letter of your law!

Oh I must keep my heart inviolate
Against the potent poison of your hate!

MULATTO

Because I am the white man's son - his own,
Bearing his bastard birth-mark on my face,
I will dispute his title to his throne,
Forever fight him for my rightful place.
There is a searing hate within my soul,
A hate that only kin can feel for kin,
A hate that makes me vigorous and whole,
And spurs me on unceasingly to win.
Because I am my cruel father's child,
My love of justice stirs me up to hate,
A warring Ishmaelite, unreconciled,
When falls the hour I shall not hesitate,
Into my father's heart to plunge the knife
To gain the utmost freedom that is life.

FOR A LEADER

You are a torchlight of humanity,
A flame of Justice burning bright, alone,
Over the miseries of mortality,
Where human hearts are dead and turned to stone.

You are that uttermost crusading part,
The trumpet and the thunder and the storm,
A nerve pulsating of the eternal Heart
That makes the miracle of the human form.

Let me be slave to all experience,
The beautiful, the utter and the strange,
For you the path of high magnificence
Climbing beyond the cloud-topped mountain range.

For you the incandescent fire of duty,
Your life consuming like a holocaust,
For me the world of passion, joy and beauty,
That makes me lover and iconoclast.

FOR A LEADER

Oh take my songs and all the love they breathe
As symbols of my feelings incomplete,
Fashioned into a variegated wreathe---
A poet's homage for your marching feet.

And as you go alone and single-willed,
Among them you may find a simple flower,
Whose perfume underneath your footsteps spilled,
May reach your senses in a lonely hour.

THE INTERNATIONAL SOUL

As flower dust is driven down the wind,
To touch and quicken the green life of earth
As symbol swallows leave cold lands behind,
For regions of sweet warmth and singing mirth:
So shall thy thought be carried surely forth
To the remotest dwelling of mankind,
Breaking down obstacles, to give new birth,
New strength, new purpose to man's boundless mind.

The birds of Time will wing thee down the ways
Of continents. Thy progress will be keen
Against the impeding storms of misty days,
As ever progress through the years has been;
Even as strong-winged messengers are seen
In these amazing times with fine amaze,
Threading the tides of space that roll between
The earth and heaven, that ever holds man's gaze.

The nations will take arms against thy power,
The peoples warn against thy conquering spirit,
That conquers like the music of a flower;
Their ruling cliques endeavor to discredit
Thy influence and rail against thy merit,
Thy starry standards war upon to lower:
But the true prophets who thy spark inherit,
Will bear them yet upon life's grandest tower.

RUSSIAN CATHEDRAL

Bow down, my soul, in worship very low,
And in the holy silences be lost...
Bow down before the marble man of woe,
Bow down before the singing angel host.
What jewelled glory fills my spirit's eye!
What golden grandeur moves the depths of me!
The soaring arches lift me up on high,
Taking my breath with their rare symmetry.

Bow down, my soul, and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne...
Bow down before the wonder of man's might,
Bow down in worship, humble and alone,
Bow lowly down, before the sacred sight
Of man's divinity alive in stone.

HONEYMOON

Sweet, be your body a rare figured rug
Upon which I may lay myself full length,
And drink your warm breath as a potent drug,
To make me amorous and increase my strength.
Let me be drunken with your passion's wine,
Our days are foodless, yet I know no pains;
Your subtle presence is an anodyne
That deadens native hungers in my veins.
My heart beats in a wanton mood to move
With the strange rhythm of your spirit's motion.
My soul's a laden boat propelled by love,
And these uplifted days a heaving ocean
Whereon we drift foam-sprinkled, shot with zest,
Desiring not reach a port of rest.