Caroling dusk : $b an anthology of verse by Negro poets — John Shaqi
Caroling dusk : $b an anthology of verse by Negro poets
General
Caroling dusk : $b an anthology of verse by Negro poets
African Americans -- Poetry; American poetry -- African American authors
In yonder East trembles a star.
_Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord!_
Thy will, O Lord, be done!
_Kyrie Eleison!_
Lord, we have done these pleading, wavering words.
_We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!_
We bow our heads and hearken soft to the sobbing of women and little
children.
_We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!_
Our voices sink in silence and in night.
_Hear us, good Lord!_
In night, O God of a godless land!
_Amen!_
In silence, O Silent God.
_Selah!_
FOOTNOTES:
[9] From “Dark Water” by W. E. B. Du Bois, Copyright 1920 by Harcourt,
Brace & Company, Inc.
WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
William Stanley Braithwaite was born in Boston
Dec. 6, 1878. He inherited the incentives and ideals of the
intellect from an ancestry of British gentlemen. He has
written verse and prose and was for many years leading
reviewer of books in the _Boston Transcript_. He has published
twenty volumes, and his yearly anthology of verse
establishes for each year the best poetry printed in the
magazines.
SCINTILLA
I kissed a kiss in youth
Upon a dead man’s brow;
And that was long ago,--
And I’m a grown man now.
It’s lain there in the dust,
Thirty years and more;--
My lips that set a light
At a dead man’s door.
RYE BREAD
Father John’s bread was made of rye,
Felicite’s bread was white;
Father John loved the sun noon-high,
Felicite, the moon at night.
Father John drank wine with his bread;
Felicite drank sweet milk;
Father John loved flowers, pungent and red;
Felicite, lilies soft as silk.
Father John’s soul was made of bronze,
That God’s salt was corroding;
Felicite’s soul was a wind that runs
With a blue flame of foreboding.
Between these two was the shadow of a dome
That cut their lives in twain;
But Dionysus led them home
In a chariot of pain.
OCTOBER XXIX, 1795
(Keats’ Birthday)
Time sitting on the throne of Memory
Bade all her subject Days the past had known
Arise and say what thing gave them renown
Unforgetable, ‘Rising from the sea,
I gave the Genoese his dreams to be;’
‘I saw the Corsican’s Guards swept down;’
‘Colonies I made free from a tyrant’s crown;’--
So each Day told its immortality.
And with these blazing triumphs spoke one voice
Whose wistful speech no vaunting did employ:
‘I know not if ’twere by Fate’s chance or choice
I hold the lowly birth of an English boy;
I only know he made man’s heart rejoice
Because he played with Beauty for a toy!’
DEL CASCAR
Del Cascar, Del Cascar
Stood upon a flaming star,
Stood and let his feet hang down
Till in China the toes turned brown.
And he reached his fingers over
The rim of the sea, like sails from Dover,
And caught a Mandarin at prayer,
And tickled his nose in Orion’s hair.
The sun went down through crimson bars,
And left his blind face battered with stars--
But the brown toes in China kept
Hot the tears Del Cascar wept.
JAMES EDWARD McCALL
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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