The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry Read online

  Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

  Missing me one place search another,

  I stop somewhere waiting for you.

  Walt Whitman, 1855

  Next | TOC> For My People> Cummings

  Next to of course god america i

  "next to of course god america i

  love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh

  say can you see by the dawn's early my

  country 'tis of centuries come and go

  and are no more what of it we should worry

  in every language even deafanddumb

  thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry

  by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

  why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-

  iful than these heroic happy dead

  who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter

  they did not stop to think they died instead

  then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

  He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

  e. e. cummings, 1926

  Next | TOC> For My People> Ginsberg

  A Supermarket in California

  What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

  In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

  What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

  I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

  I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

  I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

  We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

  Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?

  (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)

  Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.

  Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

  Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

  Allen Ginsberg, 1955

  Next | TOC> For My People> Lazarus

  The New Colossus

  Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

  With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

  Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

  A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

  Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

  Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

  Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes

  command

  The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

  "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"

  cries she

  With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

  I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

  Emma Lazarus, 1886

  Next | TOC> For My People> Reznikoff

  Let other people come as streams

  Let other people come as streams

  that overflow a valley

  and leave dead bodies, uprooted trees

  and fields of sand;

  we Jews are as the dew,

  on every blade of grass,

  trodden under foot today

  and here tomorrow morning.

  Charles Reznikoff, 1936

  Next | TOC> For My People> Reznikoff

  I will write songs against you

  I will write songs against you,

  enemies of my people; I will pelt you

  with the winged seeds of the dandelion;

  I will marshall against you

  the fireflies of the dusk.

  Charles Reznikoff, 1936

  Next | TOC> For My People> Sandburg

  from "The People, Yes"

  The people yes.

  The people will live on.

  The learning and blundering people will live on.

  They will be tricked and sold and again sold

  And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,

  The people so peculiar in renewal and

  comeback,

  You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.

  The mammoth rests between his cyclonic

  dramas.

  The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,

  is a vast huddle with many units saying:

  "I earn my living.

  I make enough to get by

  and it takes all my time.

  If I had more time

  I could do more for myself

  and maybe for others.

  I could read and study

  and talk things over

  and find out about things.

  It takes time.

  I wish I had the time."

  The people is a tragic and comic two-face:

  hero and hoodlum: phantom and gorilla twist-

  ing to moan with a gargoyle mouth: "They

  buy me and sell me . . . it's a game . . .

  sometime I'll break loose . . ."

  Once having marched

  Over the margins of animal necessity,

  Over the grim line of sheer subsistence

  Then man came

  To the deeper rituals of his bones,

  To the lights lighter than any bones,

  To the time for thinking things over,

  To the dance, the song, the story,

  Or the hours given over to dreaming,

  Once having so marched.

  Between the finite limitations of the five senses

  and the endless yearnings of man for the

  beyond the people hold to the humdrum

  bidding of work and food while reaching

  out when it comes their way for lights

  beyond the prisms of the five senses,

  for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.

  This reaching is alive.

  The panderers and liars have violated and

  smutted it.

  Yet this reaching is alive yet

  for lights and keepsakes.

  The people know the salt of the sea

  and the strength of the winds

  lashing the corners of the earth.

  The people take the earth

  as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.

  Who else speaks for the Family of Man?

  They are in tune and step

  with constellations of universal law.

  The people is a polychrome,

  a spectrum and a prism

  held in a moving monolith,

  a console organ of changing themes,

  a clavilux of color poems

  wherein the sea offers fog

  and the fog moves off in rain

  and the labrador sunset shortens

  to a nocturne of clear stars

  serene over the shot spray

  of northern lights.

  The steel mill sky is alive.

  The fire breaks white and zigzag

  shot on a gun-metal gloaming.

  Man is a long time coming.

&
nbsp; Man will yet win.

  Brother may yet line up with brother:

  This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

  There are men who can't be bought.

  The fireborn are at home in fire.

  The stars make no noise.

  You can't hinder the wind from blowing.

  Time is a great teacher.

  Who can live without hope?

  In the darkness with a great bundle of grief

  the people march.

  In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for

  keeps, the people march:

  "Where to? what next?"

  Carl Sandburg, 1936

  Next | TOC> For My People> Walker

  For My People

  For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power;

  For my people lending their strength to the years: to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding;

  For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama backyards playing baptizingand preaching, and doctor and jail and soldierand school and mama and cooking and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss Choomby and company;

  For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

  For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to be Man and Woman, to laugh and dance and sing and play and drink their wine and religion and success, to marry their playmates and bear children and then die of consumption and anemia and lynching;

  For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and HAPPY people filling the cabarets and taverns and other people's pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and land and money and Something—Something all our own;

  For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied and shackled and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

  For my people blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies, associations and councils and committees and conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty by false prophet and holy believer;

  For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

  Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control!

  Margaret Walker, 1942

  Next | TOC> For My People> Hughes

  I, too, sing America

  I, too, sing America.

  I am the darker brother.

  They send me to eat in the kitchen

  When company comes,

  But I laugh,

  And eat well,

  And grow strong.

  Tomorrow,

  I'll sit at the table

  When company comes.

  Nobody'll dare

  Say to me,

  "Eat in the kitchen,"

  Then.

  Besides,

  They'll see how beautiful I am

  And be ashamed—

  I, too, am America.

  Langston Hughes, 1926

  Next | TOC> For My People> Hughes

  Night Funeral in Harlem

  Night funeral

  in Harlem:

  Where did they get

  Them two fine cars?

  Insurance man, he did not pay—

  His insurance lapsed the other day—

  Yet they got a satin box

  For his head to lay.

  Night funeral

  in Harlem:

  Who was it sent

  That wreath of flowers?

  Them flowers came

  from that poor boy's friends—

  They'll want flowers, too,

  When they meet their ends.

  Night funeral

  in Harlem:

  Who preached that

  Black boy to his grave?

  Old preacher-man

  Preached that boy away—

  Charged Five Dollars

  His girl friend had to pay.

  Night funeral

  in Harlem:

  When it was all over

  And the lid shut on his head

  and the organ had done played

  and the last prayers been said

  and six pallbearers

  Carried him out for dead

  And off down Lenox Avenue

  That long black hearse done sped,

  The street light

  At his corner

  Shined just like a tear—

  That boy that they was mournin'

  Was so dear, so dear

  To them folks that brought the flowers,

  To that girl who paid the preacher-man—

  It was all their tears that made

  That poor boy's

  Funeral grand.

  Night funeral

  in Harlem.

  Langston Hughes, 1951

  Next | TOC> For My People> Sexton

  The Firebombers

  We are America.

  We are the coffin fillers.

  We are the grocers of death.

  We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.

  The bomb opens like a shoebox.

  And the child?

  The child is certainly not yawning.

  And the woman?

  The woman is bathing her heart.

  It has been torn out of her

  and because it is burnt

  and as a last act

  she is rinsing it off in the river.

  This is the death market.

  America,

  where are your credentials?

  Anne Sexton, 1972

  Next | TOC> For My People> Ginsberg

  from "Howl"

  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

  dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

  angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

  who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

  who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering to tenement roofs illuminated,

  who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

  who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

  who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall . . .

  who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

  who were burned alive in their
innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were rundown by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

  who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge—this actually happened—and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

  who sang out their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930's German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

  who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,

  who drove crosscountry seventy two hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

  who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

  who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

  who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

  who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

  who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,