Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Poetry Wednesday

By A. Church

Now that I see you
(In a round about way)
Tell me your secrets
And who you will be

---

Wallow in this muddy way
For He will do it
Pigs and pigeons
Find surprising cleanliness
By rolling in the dirt.


---

Frederick Douglass

by Robert Hayden


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 finally won; when it is more   
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:   
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro   
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world   
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,   
this man, superb in love and logic, this man   
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,   
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives   
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

1 comment:

  1. The secrets are beginning to unfold. I feel blessed that I will get a lifetime to see who she will be!

    ReplyDelete