I know the magic word, the graceful thought, The song that fills me in my lucid hours, The spirit’s wine that thrills my body through, And makes me music-drunk, are yours, all yours. I cannot praise, for you have passed from praise, I have no tinted thoughts to paint you true; But I can feel and I can write the word; The best of me is but the least of you. WHEN I HAVE PASSED AWAY When I have passed away and am forgotten, And no one living can recall my face, When under alien sod my bones lie rotten With not a tree or stone to mark the place; Perchance a pensive youth, with passion burning, For olden verse that smacks of love and wine, The musty pages of old volumes turning, May light upon a little song of mine, And he may softly hum the tune and wonder Who wrote the verses in the long ago; Or he may sit him down awhile to ponder Upon the simple words that touch him so. ENSLAVED Oh when I think of my long-suffering race, For weary centuries despised, oppressed, Enslaved and lynched, denied a human place In the great life line of the Christian West; And in the Black Land disinherited, Robbed in the ancient country of its birth, My heart grows sick with hate, becomes as lead, For this my race that has no home on earth. Then from the dark depths of my soul I cry To the avenging angel to consume The white man’s world of wonders utterly: Let it be swallowed up in earth’s vast womb, Or upward roll as sacrificial smoke To liberate my people from its yoke! I SHALL RETURN I shall return again; I shall return To laugh and love and watch with wonder-eyes At golden noon the forest fires burn, Wafting their blue-black smoke to sapphire skies. I shall return to loiter by the streams That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses, And realize once more my thousand dreams Of waters rushing down the mountain passes. I shall return to hear the fiddle and fife Of village dances, dear delicious tunes That stir the hidden depths of native life, Stray melodies of dim remembered runes. I shall return, I shall return again, To ease my mind of long, long years of pain. MORNING JOY At night the wide and level stretch of wold, Which at high noon had basked in quiet gold, Far as the eye could see was ghostly white; Dark was the night save for the snow’s weird light. I drew the shades far down, crept into bed; Hearing the cold wind moaning overhead Through the sad pines, my soul, catching its pain, Went sorrowing with it across the plain. At dawn, behold! the pall of night was gone, Save where a few shrubs melancholy, lone, Detained a fragile shadow. Golden-lipped The laughing grasses heaven’s sweet wine sipped.