They fight your battles for you every day, The zealous ones, who sorrow in your life. Undaunted by a century of strife, With urgent fingers still they point the way To drawing rooms, in decorous array, And moral Heavens where no casual wife May share your lot; where dice and ready knife Are barred; and feet are silent when you pray. But you have music in your shuffling feet, And spirituals for a lenient Lord, Who lets you sing your promises away. You hold your sunny corner of the street, And pluck deep beauty from a banjo chord: Philosopher whose future is today! D.H. UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS The judge, who lives impeccably upstairs With dull decorum and its implication, Has all his servants in to family prayers, And edifies _his_ soul with exhortation. Meanwhile his blacks live wastefully downstairs; Not always chaste, they manage to exist With less decorum than the judge upstairs, And find withal a something that he missed. This painful fact a Swede philosopher, Who tarried for a fortnight in our city, Remarked, one evening at the meal, before We paralyzed him silent with our pity-- Saying the black man living with the white Had given more than white men could requite. H.A. HAG-HOLLERIN' TIME Black Julius peered out from the galley fly; Behind Jim Island, lying long and dim; An infra owl-light tinged the twilight sky As if a bonfire burned for cherubim. Dark orange flames came leering through the pines, And then the moon's face, struggling with a sneeze, Along the flat horizon's level lines Her nostrils fingered with palmetto trees. Her platinum wand made water wrinkles buckle; Old Julius gave appreciative chuckle; "It's jes about hag-hollerin' time," he said. I watched the globous buckeyes in his head Peer back along the bloody moon-wash dim To see the fish-tailed water-witches swim. H.A. MACABRE IN MACAWS After the hurricane of the late forties, Peter Polite says, in the live-oak trees Were weird, macabre macaws And ash-colored cockatoos, blown overseas From Nassau and the West Indies. These hopped about like dead men's thoughts Among the draggled Spanish moss, Preening themselves, all at a loss, Preening faint _caws_, And shrieking from nostalgia-- With dull screams like a child Born with neuralgia-- And this seems true to me, Fitting the landscape's drab grotesquery. H.A. GAMESTERS ALL[7]